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FIRST IMPRESSIONS 



v 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE 



BY 



HUGH MILLER, 



AUTHOR OP THE "FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR, 
THE "OLD RED SANDSTONE," ETC. 



Do you not think a man may be the wiser — I ha<l almost said the better — for going 
a hundred or two of miles ? " — Gray's Letters. 



BOSTON: 

GOULD AND LINCOLN, 

59 WASHINGTON STREET. 

NEW YORK: SHELDON, BLAKEMAN & CO. 
CINCINNATI: GEO. S. BLANCHARD. 

1857. 



&> 



^i: 



^ 




Stereotyped by 

HOBAB.T & ROBBIN9; 

KEW ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOCXDERT, 

BOSIO S. 



Printed by Geo. C. Rand & Co No. 3 Coruliill. 



TO THE READER 



Times have changed since our earlier British Novelists, when 
they sought to make the incidents lie thick in their fictions, gave 
them the form of a journey, and sent their heroes a travelling over 
England. The one-half of " Tom Jones," two-thirds of " Joseph 
Andrews," not a few of the most amusing chapters in " Roderick 
Random" and " Launcelot Greaves," and the whole of "Hum- 
phrey Clinker," are thrown into this form. They are works of 
English travels ; and the adventures with which they are enlivened 
arise by the wayside. 

It would be rather a difficult matter, in these later times, to make 
a novel out of an English tour. The country, measured by days' 
journeys, has grown nine-tenths smaller than it was in the times of 
Fielding and Smollett. The law has become too strong for Captain 
Macheath the highwayman, and the public too knowing for Mr 
Jenkinson the swindler. The journeyer by moonlight, who acci- 
dentally loses his road, stumbles on no "Hermit of the Hill," 
wrapped up in a grotesque dress of skins ; but merely encounters, 

instead, some suspicious gamekeeper, taking his night-rounds in 
1# 



VI TO THE READER. 

oelialf of the Sq lire's pheasants. When mill-dams give way dur- 
ing the rains, honest Mat Brambles do not discover, in consequence 
their affinity to devoted Humphrey Clinkers : there is merely a half- 
hour's stoppage of the train, barren of incident, save that the male 
passengers get out to smoke, while the ladies sit still. And as for 
the frequent tragedy of railway collision accidents, it has but little 
of the classic about it, and is more appropriately recorded in news- 
paper columns, struck off for the passing day, than in pages of 
higher pretensions, written for to-morrow. England has become a 
greatly less fertile field of adventure than when, according to the 
AnglicB Metropolis for 1690, the " weekly wagon of Richard Ham- 
ersly the carrier" formed the sole conveyance, for passengers who 
did not ride horses of their own, between Brumegham and the 
capital. 

But though the age of personal adventure has to a certainty gone 
by, the age which has succeeded is scarcely less fertile in incident 
on a larger scale, and of a greatly more remarkable character. It 
would seem as if the same change which has abridged the area of 
the country had given condensation to its history. We are not only 
travelling, but also, as a people, living fast ; and see revolutions 
which were formerly the slow work of ages matured in a few brief 
seasons. Opinion, during the last twenty years, has accomplished, 
though in a reverse order, the cycle of the two previous centuries. 
From the Reformation to the Revolution, the ecclesiastical reigned 
paramount in men's minds : from the Revolution to the breaking 
out of the first American war, — a quiet time in the main, — gov- 



TO THE READER. VI] 

ernments managed their business much through the medium of 
individual influence, little personal interests carried the day, and 
monarchs and ministers bulked large in the forefront of the passing 
events : from the first American war till the rise of Napoleon, the 
hot political delirium raged wide among the masses, and even states- 
men of the old school learned to recognize the people as a power. 
Now, such, in effect, has been the cycle of the last twenty years. 
The reign of George the Fourth was also that of personal and party 
influence. With the accession of William the political fever again 
broke out, and swept the country in a greatly more alterative and 
irresistible form than at first. And now, here, in the times of Vic- 
toria, are we scarce less decidedly enveloped in the still thickening 
ecclesiastical element than our ancestors of the sixteenth century. 
If there be less of personal adventure in the England of the pres- 
ent day than in that of Queen Anne and the two first Georges, there 
is, as if to make amends, greatly more of incident in the history of 
the masses. It has been remarked by some students of the Apoca- 
lypse, that the course of the predicted events at first moves slowly, 
as, one after one, six of the seven seals are opened ; that, on the 
opening of the seventh seal, the progress is so considerably quick- 
ened that the seventh period proves as fertile in events, — repre- 
sented by the sounding of the seven trumpets, — as the foregoing 
six taken together ; and that, on the sounding of the seventh trumpet, 
so great is the further acceleration, that there is an amount of inci- 
dent condensed in this seventh part of the seventh period, equal, as 
in the former case, to that of all the previous six parts in one. 



VIII TO THE READER. 

There are three cycles, it has been said, in the scheme, — cycle 
within cycle ; the second comprised within a seventh portion of the 
first, and the third within a seventh portion of the second. Be this 
as it may, we may at least see something that exceedingly resembles 
it in that actual economy of change and revolution manifested in 
English history for the last two centuries. It would seem as if 
events, in their downward course, had come under the influence 
of that law of gravitation through which falling bodies increase 
in speed, as they descend, according to the squares of the dis- 
tances. 

Though there may be little to encounter in such a state of society, 
there must, of necessity, be a good deal to observe : the traveller 
may have few incidents to relate, and yet many appearances to 
describe. He finds himself in the circumstances of the mariner 
who sits listlessly in the calm and sunshine of a northern summer 
and watches the ever-changing aspect of some magnificent iceberg, 
as its sun-gilt pinnacles sharpen and attenuate, and its deep fissures 
widen and extend, and the incessant rush of the emancipated waters 
is heard to reecho from amid the green light of the dim twilight 
caverns within. Society in England, in the present day, exists, 
like the thawing iceberg, in a transition state, and presents its con 
sequent shiftings of aspect and changes of feature ; and such is the 
peculiar degree of sensitiveness at which the government of the 
country has arrived, — partly, it would seem, from the fluctuating 
nature of the extended basis of representation on which it now 
res t s — that, like some nervous valetudinarian, open to every influ- 



TO THE READER. IX 

ence of climate and the weather, there is scaice a change that can 
come over opinion, or affect the people in even their purely physical 
concerns, which does not more or less fully index itself in the 
statute-book. The autumn of 1845, in which I travelled over Eng- 
land, was ungenial and lowering, and I saw wheaten fields deeply 
tinged with brown, — an effect of the soaking rains, — and large 
tracts of diseased potatoes. A season equally bad, however, twenty 
years ago would have failed to influence the politics of the country. 
Its frequent storms might have desolated the fruits of the earth, 
but they would have made no impression on the Statutes at Large. 
But the storms of 1845 proved greatly more influential. They were 
included in the cycle of rapid change, and annihilated at once the 
Protectionist policy and party of the empire. And amid the fer- 
menting components of English society there may be detected ele- 
ments of revolution in their first causes, destined, apparently, to 
exercise an influence on public affairs at least not less considerable 
than the rains and tempests of the Autumn of Forty-Five. The 
growing Tractarianism of the National Church threatens to work 
greater changes than the bad potatoes ; and the semi-infidel liberal- 
ism of the country, fast passing into an aggressive power, than the 
damaged corn. 

The reader will find in the following pages, as from these remarks 
he may be led to anticipate, scarce any personal anecdote or adven- 
ture : they here and there record a brief dialogue by the way-side, 
or in some humble lodging-house, and here and there a solitary 
stroll through a wood, or a thoughtful lounge in a quarry; bu* 



& TO THE READER. 

thei3 is considerably more of eye and ear in them, — of things seen 
and heard, — than of aught else. They index, however, not much 
of what he might be led equally to expect, — those diagnostic symp- 
toms impressed on the face of society, that indicate the extensive 
changes, secular and ecclesiastical, which seem so peculiarly charac- 
teristic of the time. The journey of which they form a record was 
undertaken purely for purposes of relaxation, in that state of indif- 
ferent health, and consequent languor, which an over-strain of the 
mental faculties usually induces, and in which, like the sick animal 
that secludes itself from the herd, man prefers walking apart from 
his kind, to seeking them out in the bustle and turmoil of active 
life, there to note peculiarities of aspect or character, like an adven- 
turous artist taking sketches amid the heat of a battle. They will, 
however, lead the reader who accompanies me in my rambles con- 
siderably out of the usual route of the tourist, into sequestered 
corners, associated with the rich literature of England, or amid 
rocks and caverns, in which the geologist finds curious trace of 
the history of the country as it existed during the long cycles of 
the bygone creations. I trust I need scarce apologize to the gen- 
eral reader for my frequent transitions from the actual state of 
things to those extinct states which obtained in what is now Eng- 
land, during the geologic periods. The art, so peculiar to the 
present age, of deciphering the ancient hiercglyphics sculptured on 
the rocks of our country, is gradually extending from the few to 
the many : it will be comparatively a common accomplishment half 
a generation hen^e ; and when the hard names of the science shall 



TO THE READER. XI 

have become familiar enough no longer to obscure its poetry, it will 
be found that what I have attempted to do will be done, proportion- 
ally to their measure of ability, by travellers generally. In hazard- 
ing the prediction, I build on the fact, that it is according to the 
intellectual nature of man to delight in the metaphor and the simile, 
— in pictures of the past and dreams of the future, — in short, in 
whatever introduces amid one set of figures palpable to the senses 
another visible but to the imagination, and thus blends the ideal 
with the actual, like some fanciful allegorist, sculptor, or painter, 
who mixes up with his groups of real personages qualities and dis- 
positions embodied in human form, — angelic virtues with wings 
growing out of their shoulders, and brutal vices furnished with tails 
and claws. And it is impossible, such being the mental constitution 
of the species, to see the events of other creations legibly engraved 
all around, as with an iron pen, on the face of nature, without let- 
ting the mind loose to expatiate on those historic periods to which 
the record so graphically refers. The geologist in our own country 
feels himself in exactly the circumstances of the traveller who jour- 
neys amid the deserts of Sinai, and sees the front of almost every 
precipice roughened with antique inscriptions of which he has just 
discovered the key, — inscriptions that transport him from the silence 
and solitude of the present, to a darkly remote past, when the lone- 
liness of the wilderness was cheered by the white glitter of unnum- 
bered tents, and the breeze, as it murmured by, went laden with the 
cheerful hum of a great people. 

It may be judged, I am afraid, that to some of the localities I 



XII TO THE READER. 

devoted too much and to some too little time, in proportion to the 
degree of interest which attached to them. The Leasowes detained 
me considerably longer than Stratford-on-Avon ; and I oftener refer 
to Shenstone than to Shakspeare. It will, I trust, be found, how- 
ever, that I was influenced in such cases by no suspicious sympathy 
with the little and the mediocre ; and that, if I preferred at times 
the less fertile to the richer and better field, it has been simply, not 
because I failed to estimate their comparative values, but because I 
found a positive though scanty harvest awaiting me on the one, and 
on the other the originally luxuriant swathe cut down and carried 
away, and but a vacant breadth of stubble left to the belated gleaner. 
Besides, it is not in his character as a merely tasteful versifier, but 
as a master in the art of developing the beauties of landscape, that 
I have had occasion to refer to Shenstone. He is introduced to the 
reader as the author of the Leasowes, — a work which cost him 
more thought and labor than all his other compositions put together, 
and which the general reader, who has to prosecute his travels by 
the fire-side, can study but at second hand, — as it now exists in 
sketches such as mine, or as it existed, at the death of its author, 
in the more elaborate description of Dodsley. It is thus not to a 
minor poet that I have devoted a chapter or two, but to a fine rural 
poem, some two or three hundred acres in extent, that cannot be 
printed, and that exists nowhere in duplicate. 

It does matter considerably in some things that a man's cradle 
should have been rocked to the north of the Tweed ; and as I have 
been at less pains to suppress in my writings the peculiarities of the 



TO THE READER. XIII 

Scot and the Presbyterian than is perhaps common with my country- 
folk and brother Churchmen, the Englishman will detect much in 
these pages to remind him that mine was rocked to the north of the 
Tweed very decidedly. I trust, however, that if he deem me in the 
main a not ill-natured companion, he may feel inclined to make as 
large allowances for the peculiar prejudices of my training as he 
sees me making on most occasions for the peculiar prejudices of 
his ; that he may forgive me my partialities to my own poor coun- 
try, if they do not greatly warp my judgment nor swallow up my 
love for my kind ; that he may tolerate my Presbyterianism, if he 
find it rendering a reason for its preferences, and not very bigoted in 
its dislikes ; and, in short, that we may part friends, not enemies, 
if he can conclude, without over-straining his charity, that I have 
communicated fairly, and in no invidious spirit, my First Impres- 
sions of England and its People. 
2 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

Led to convert an intended Voyage to Orkney into a Journey to England. 

— Objects of the Journey. — Carter Fell. — The Border Line. — Well 
for England it should have been so doggedly maintained by the weaker 
Country. — Otterburn. — The Mountain Limestone in England, what it 
is not in Scotland, a true Mountain Limestone. — Scenery changes as 
we enter the Coal Measures. — Wretched Weather. — Newcastle. — 
Methodists. — Controversy on the Atonement. — The Popular Mind in 
Scotland mainly developed by its Theology. — Newcastle Museum ; rich 
in its Geology and its Antiquities ; both branches of one subject. — 
Geologic History of the Roman Invasion. — Durham Cathedral. — The 
Monuments of Nature greatly more enduring than those of Man. — Cya- 
thophyllum Fungites. — The Spotted Tubers, and what they indicated. 

— The Destiny of a Nation involved in the Growth of a minute 
Fungus 25 



CHAPTER II. 

Weather still miserably bad ; suited to betray the frequent Poverty of 
English Landscape. — Gloomy Prospects of the Agriculturist. — Corn- 
Law League. — York ; a true Sacerdotal City. — Cathedral ; noble Ex- 
terior j Interior not less impressive ; Congreye's sublime Description. * 



XVI CONTENTS. 

Unpardonable Solecism. — Procession. — Dean Cockbarn ; Crusade 
against the Geologists. — Cathedral Service unworthy of the Cathedral. 

— Walk on the City Ramparts. — Flat Fertility of the surrounding 
Country. — The more interesting Passages in the History of York sup- 
plied by the Makers. — Robinson Crusoe. — Jeanie Deans. — Trial of 
Eugene Aram. — > Aram's real Character widely different from that drawn 
by the Novelist 42 

CHAPTER III. 

Quit York for Manchester. — A Character. — Quaker Lady. — Peculiar 
Feature in the Husbandry of the Cloth District. — Leeds. — Simplicity 
manifested in the Geologic Framework of English Scenery. — The De- 
nuding Agencies almost invariably the sole Architects of the Landscape. 

— Manchester ; characteristic Peculiarities ; the Irwell ; Collegiate 
Chur, n ; light and elegant Proportions of the Building; its grotesque 
Sculptures ; these indicative of the Scepticism of the Age in which they 
were produced. — St. Bartholomew's Day. — Sermon on Saints' Day. 

— Timothy's Grandmother. — The Puseyite a High Churchman become 
earnest. — Passengers of a Sunday Evening Train. — Sabbath Amuse- 
ments not very conducive to Happiness. — The Economic Value of the 
Sabbath ill understood by the Utilitarian. — Testimony of History on 
the point 55 

CHAPTER IV. 

Quit Mancuester for Wolverhampton. — Scenery of the New Red Sand- 
stone ; apparent Repetition of Pattern. — The frequent Marshes of Eng- 
land ; curiously represented in the National Literature ; Influence on 
the National Superstitions. — Wolverhampton. — Peculiar Aspect of the 
Dudley Coal-field ; striking Passage in its History. — The Rise of Bir- 
mingham into a great Manufacturing Town an Effect of the Develop 



CONTENTS. XVII 

ment of its Mineral Treasures. — Upper Ludlow Deposit; Aymestry 
Limestone ; both Deposits of peculiar Interest to the Scotch Geologist. 
— The Lingula Lewisii and Terebratula Wilsoni. — General Resem- 
blance of the Silurian Fossils to those of the Mountain Limestone. — 
First-born of the Vertebrata yet known. — Order of Creation. — The 
Wren's Nest. — Fossils of the Wenlock Limestone ; in a State of beauti- 
ful Keeping. — Anecdote. — Asaphus Caudatus ; common, it would seem, 
to both the Silurian and Carboniferous Rocks. — Limestone Miners. — 
Noble Gallery excavated in the Hill 72 

CHAPTER V. 

Dudley ; significant Marks of the Mining Town. — Kindly Scotch Land- 
lady. — Temperance Coffee-house. — Little Samuel the Teetotaller. — 
Curious Incident. — Anecdote. — The Resuscitated Spinet. — Forbear- 
ance of little Samuel. — Dudley Museum ; singularly rich in Silurian 
Fossils. — Megalichthys Hibberti. — Fossils from Mount Lebanon ; very 
modern compared with those of the Hill of Dudley. — Geology pecu- 
liarly fitted to revolutionize one's Ideas of Modern and Ancient. — Fos- 
sils of extreme Antiquity furnished by a Canadian Township that had 
ao name twenty years ago. — Fossils from the Old Egyptian Desert found 
to be comparatively of Yesterday. — Dudley Castle and Castle-hill. — 
Cromwell's Mission. — Castle finds a faithful Chronicler in an old 
Serving-maid. — Her Narrative. — Caves and Fossils of the Castle- 
hill. — Extensive Excavations. — Superiority of the Natural to the Arti- 
ficial Cavern. — Fossils of the Scottish Grauwacke. — Analogy between 
the Female Lobster and the Trilobite 92 



CHAPTER VI. 

Stourbridge. — Effect of Plutonic Convulsion on the surrounding Scenery. 
— Hagley ; Description in the " Seasons." — Geology the true Anatomy 
2* 



XVIII CONTENTS. 

of Landscape. — Geologic Sketch of Hagley. — The Road to the Races. 

— The old Stone-cutter. — Thomson's Hollow. — His visits to Hagley. 

— Shenstonfrs Urn. — Peculiarities of Taste founded often on a Sub- 
stratum of Persoual Character. — Illustration. — Rousseau. — Pope's 
Haunt. — Lyttelton's high Admiration of the Genius of Pope. — De- 
scription. — Singularly extensive and beautiful Landscape ; drawn by 
Thomson. — Reflection. — Amazing Multiplicity of the Prospect illus 
trative of a Peculiarity in the Descriptions of the " Seasons." — Addi- 
son's Canon on Landscape ; corroborated by Shenstone. ... 119 



CHAPTER VII. 

Hagley Parish Church. — The Sepulchral Marbles of the Lytteltons. — 
Epitaph on the Lady Lucy. — The Phrenological Doctrine of Hereditary 
Transmission ; unsupported by History, save in a way in which His- 
tory can be made to support anything. — Thomas Lord Lyttelton ; his 
Moral Character a strange Contrast to that of his Father. — The Elder 
Lyttelton ; his Death-bed. — Aberrations of the Younger Lord. — 
Strange Ghost Story ; Curious Modes of accounting for it. — Return to 
Stourbridge. — Late Drive. — Hales Owen 138 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Abbotsford and the Leasowes. — The one place naturally suggestive of 
the other. — Shenstone. — The Leasowes his most elaborate Composi- 
tion. — The English Squire and his Mill. — Hales Owen Abbey ; inter- 
esting, as the Subject of one of Shenstone's larger Poems. — The old 
anti-Popish Feeling of England well exemplified by the Fact. — Its 
Origin and History. — Decline. — Infidelity naturally favorable to the 
Resuscitation and Reproduction of Popery. — The two Naileresses. — 
Cecilia and Delia. — Skeleton Description of the Leasowes. — Poetic 
filling up. — The Spinster. —The Fountain 157 



CONTENTS. XIX 

CHAPTER IX. 

Detour. — The Leasowes deteriorated wherever the Poet had built, and 
improved wherever he had planted. — View from the Hanging Wood. 
— Stratagem of the Island Screen. — Virgil's Grave. — Mound of the 
Hales Owen and Birmingham Canal ; its sad Interference with Shen- 
stone's Poetic Description of the Infancy of the Stour. — Vanished 
Cascade and Root-house. — Somerville's Urn. — " To all Friends round 
the Wrekin." — River Scenery of the Leasowes ; their great Variety. — 
Peculiar Arts of the Poet ; his Vistas, when seen from the wrong end, 
Realizations of Hogarth's Caricature. — Shenstone the greatest of Land- 
scape Gardeners. — Estimate of Johnson. — Goldsmith's History of the 
Leasowes ; their after History 175 

CHAPTER X. 

Shenstone's Verses. — The singular Unhappiness of his Paradise. — Eng- 
lish Cider. — Scotch and English Dwellings contrasted. — The Nailers 
of Hales Owen ; their Politics a Century ago. — Competition of the 
Scotch Nailers ; unsuccessful, and why. — Samuel Salt, the Hales Owen 
Poet. — Village Church. — Salt Works at Droitwich ; their great Anti- 
quity. — Appearance of the Village. — Problem furnished by the Sal 
Deposits of England ; various Theories. — Rock Salt deemed by some s 
Volcanic Product ; hy others the Deposition of an overcharged Sea; hy 
yet others the Produce of vast Lagoons. — l.eland. — The Manufacture 
of Salt from Sea-water superseded, even iti Scotland, by the Rock Salt 
of England 193 

CHAPTER XI. 

Walk to the Clent Hills. — Incident in a Fruit Shop. — St. Kenelm's 
Chapel. — Legend of St. Kenelm. —Ancient Village of Clent ; its Ap- 



XX CONTENTS. 

pearance and Character. — View from the Clent Hills. — Mr. Thomas 
Moss. — Geologic Peculiarities of the Landscape; Illustration. — The 
Scotch Drift. — Boulders ; these transported by the Agency of Ice Floes. 
— Evidence of the Former Existence of a broad Ocean Channel. — The 
Geography of the Geologist. — Aspect of the Earth ever Changing.— 
Geography of the Palaeozoic Period ; of the Secondary ; of the Ter- 
tiary. — Ocean the great Agent of Change and Dilapidation. . . 209 



CHAPTER XII. 

Geological Coloring of the Landscape. — Close Proximity in this Neigh 
lorhood of the various Geologic Systems. — The Oolite ; its Medicinal 
Springs ; how formed. — Cheltenham. — Strathpeffer. — The Saliferous 
System ; its Organic Remains and Foot-prints. — Record of Curious 
Passages in the History of the Earlier Reptiles. — Salt Deposits. — 
Theory. — The Abstraction of Salt from the Sea on a large Scale prob- 
ably necessary to the continued Existence of its Denizens. — Lowei 
New Red Sandstone. — Great Geologic Revolution. — Elevation of the 
Trap. — Hills of Clent ; Era of the Elevation. — Coal Measures ; theii 
three Forests in the Neighborhood of Wolverhampton. — Comparatively 
small Area of the Birmingham Coal-field. — Vast Coal-fields of the 
United States. — Berkeley's Prophecy. — Old Red Sandstone. —Silurian 
System. — Blank 229 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Birmingham ; incessant Clamor of the Place. — Toy-shop of Britain ; Se- 
rious Character of the Games in which its Toys are chiefly employed 
— Museum. — Liberality of the Scientific English. — Musical Genius 
of Birmingham. — Theory. — Controversy with the Yorkers. — Anec- 
dote. — The English Language spoken very variously by the English ; 



CONTENTS. XXI 

in most cases spoken very ill. — English Type of Person. — Attend a 
Puseyite Chapel. — Puseyism a feeble Imitation of Popery. — Popish 
Cathedral. — Popery the true Resting-place of the Puseyite. — Sketch 
of the Rise and Progress of the Puseyite Principle ; its purposed Object 
not attained ; Hostility to Science. — English Funerals. . . . 252 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Drive from Birmingham to Stratford rather tame. — Ancient Building in 
a modern-looking Street ; of rude and humble Appearance. — "The Im- 
mortal Shakspeare born in this House." — Description of the Interior. - 
The Walls and Ceiling covered with Names. — Albums. — Shakspeare, 
Scott, Dickens ; greatly different in their Intellectual Stature, but yet 
all of one Family. — Principle by which to take their Measure. — No 
Dramatist ever draws an Intellect taller than his own. — Imitative Fac- 
ulty. — The Reports of Dickens. — Learning of Shakspeare. — New 
Place. — The Rev. Francis Gastrall. — Stratford Church. — The Poet's 
Grave; his Bust; far superior to the idealized Representations. — The 
Avon. — The Jubilee, and Cowper's Description of it.— The true Hero 
Worship. — Quit Stratford for Olney. — Get into bad Company by tbe 
way. — Gentlemen of the Fancy. — Adventure 27G 



CHAPTER XV. 

Cowper ; his singular Magnanimity of Character ; Argument furnished by 
his latter Religious History against the Selfish PhLosophy. — Valley 
of the Ouse. — Approach to Olney. — Appearance of the Town. — Cow- 
per's House ; Parlor ; Garden — Pippin-tree planted by the Poet. - 
Summer-house writtea within and without. — John Tawell. — Delightful 
Old Woman. — Westoa-Underwood. — Thomas Scott's House. — The 
Park of th3 Throckmortois. — Walk described in " The Task." — Wil 



XXII CONTENTS. 

derness. — Ancient Avenue. — Alcove ; Prospect which it commands^ 
as drawn by Cowper. — Col nnade. — Rustic Bridge. — Scene of the 
"Needless Alarm." — The Milk Thistle 297 



CHAPTER XVI. 

Yardley Oak ; of immense Size and imposing Appearance. — Cowper's 
Description singularly illustrative of his complete Mastery over Lan- 
guage. — Peasant's Nest. — The Poet's Vocation peculiarly one of 
Revolution. — The School of Pope ; supplanted in its unproductive Old 
Age by that of Cowper. — Cowper's Coadjutors in the Work. — Econ- 
omy of Literary Revolution , — The old English Yeoman. — Quit Olney. 
— Companions in the Journey. — Incident. — Newport Pagnell. — Mr. 
Bull and the French Mystics. — Lady of the Fancy. — Champion of all 
England. — Pugilism. — Anecdote 315 



CHAPTER XVII. 

Cowper and the Geologists. — Geology in the Poet's Days in a State of 
great Immaturity. — Case different now. — Folly of committing the 
Bible to a False Science. — Galileo. — Geologists at one in all their 
more important Deductions ; vast Antiquity of the Earth one of these. 
— State of the Question. — Illustration. — Presumed Thickness of the 
Fossiliferous Strata. — Peculiar Order of their Organic Contents; of 
their Fossil Fish in particular, as ascertained by Agassiz. — The Geo- 
logic Races of Animals entirely different from those which sheltered 
with Noah in t*ie Ark. — Alleged Discrepancy between Geologic Fact 
and the Mosaic Record not real. — Inference based on the opening 
Verses of the Book of Genesis. — Parallel Passage adduced to prove 
the Inference unsound. — The Supposition that Fossils may have been 
created such examined : unworthy of the Divine Wisdom ; contrary to 



CONTENTS. XXTII 

the Principles which regulate Human Belief ; subversive of the grand 
Argument founded on Design. — The profounder Theologians of the Day 
not Anti-Geologists. — Geologic Fact in reality of a kind fitted to per- 
form important Work in the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed ; 
subversive of the " Infinite-Series " Argument of the Atheist ; subver- 
sive, too, of the Objection drawn by Infidelity from an Astronomical 
Analogy. — Counter-objection. — Illustration 335 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

Tne Penny-a-mile Train and its Passengers. — Aunt Jonathan. — London 
by Night. — St. Paul's ; the City as seen from the Dome. — The Lord 
Mayor's Coach. — Westminster Abbey. — The Gothic Architecture a 
less exquisite Production of the Human Mind than the Grecian. — Poets' 
Corner. — The Mission of the Poets. — The Tombs of the Kings. — The 
Monument of James Watt. — A humble Coffee-house and its Frequent- 
ers.— Th3 Woes of Genius in London. — Old 110, Thames-street. — 
The Tower. — The Thames Tunnel.— -Longings of the True Londoner 
for Rural Life and the Country; their Influence on Literature. — The 
British Museum ; its splendid Collection of Fossil Remains. — Human 
Skeleton of Guadaloupe. — The Egyptian Room. — Domesticities of the 
Ancient Egyptians. — Cycle of Reproduction. — The Mummies. . 366 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Harrow-on-the-Hill. — Descent through the Formations from the Tertiary 
to the Coai Measures. — Journey of a Hundred and Twenty Miles North- 
wards identical, geologically, with a journey of a Mile and a Quarter 
Downwards. — English very unlike Scottish Landscape in its Geologic 
Framework. — Birmingham Fair. — Credulity of the Rural English ; 
striking Contrast which they furnish, in this Respect, to their Country- 
men of the Knowing Type. — The English Grades of Intellectual Char- 



XXIV CONTENTS, 

acter of Immense Range ; more in Extremes than those of the Scotch. — 
Front Rank of British Intellect in which there stands no Scotchman ; 
probable Cause. — A Class of English, on the other Hand, greatly lower 
than the Scotch ; naturally less Curious ; acquire, in Consequence, less 
of the Developing Pabulum. — The main Cause of the Difference to be 
found, however, in the very dissimilar Religious Character of the two 
Countries. — The Scot naturally less independent than the Englishman ; 
strengthened, however, where his Character most needs Strength, by 
his Religion. — The Independence of the Englishman subjected at the 
present Time to two distinct Adverse Influences, — the Modern Poor Law 
and the Tenant-at-will System. — Walsall. — Liverpool. — Sort of Lodg- 
ing-houses in which one is sure to meet many Dissenters. . . . 339 



CHAPTER XX. 

Dissent a Mid-formation Organism in England. — Church of Englandism 
strong among the Upper and Lower Classes : its Peculiar Principle of 
Strength among the Lower ; among the Upper. — The Church of Eng- 
land one of the strongest Institutions of the Country. — Puseyism, how- 
ever, a Canker-worm at its Root ; Partial Success of the Principle. — 
The Type of English Dissent essentially different from that of Scot- 
land ; the Causes of the Difference deep in the Diverse Character of 
the two Peoples. — Insulated Character of the Englishman productive 
of Independency. — Adhesive Character of the Scotch productive of 
Presbyterianism. — Attempts to legislate for the Scotch in Church 
Matters on an English Principle always unfortunate. — Erastianism; 
essentially a different thing to the English Churchman from what it 
is to the Scot. — Reason why. — Independent Scotch Congregation in 
a Rural Distrht. — Rarely well based ; and why. — Conclusion. . 407 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE 



CHAPTER I. 

Led to convert an intended Voyage to Orkney into a Journey to Eigland. 
-Objects of the Journey. —Carter Fell. —The Border Line. — Well 
for England it should have been so doggedly maintained by the weaker 
Country. — Otterburn. — The Mountain Limestone in England, what it 
is not in Scotland, a true Mountain Limestone. — Scenery changes as 
we enter the Coal Measures. — Wretched Weather. — Newcastle. — 
Methodists. — Controversy on the Atonement. — The Popular Mind in 
Scotland mainly developed by its Theology. — Newcastle Museum ; rich 
in its Geology and its Antiquities ; both branches of one stibject. — 
Geologic History of the Roman Invasion. — Durham Cathedral. — The 
Monuments of Nature greatly more enduring than those of Man. — Cya- 
thophyllum Fungites. — The Spotted Tubers, and what they indicated. 
— The Destiny of a Nation involved in the Growth of a minute Fungus. 

I had purposed visiting the Orkneys, and spending my few 
weeks of autumn leisure in exploring the Old Eed Sandstone 
of these islands along the noble coast sections opened up by the 
sea. My vacations during the five previous seasons had been 
devoted to an examination of the fossiliferous deposits of Scot- 
land. I had already in some degree acquainted myself with 
the Palaeozoic and Secondary formations of the northern hair 
of the kingdom and the Hebrides. One vacation more would 
have acquainted me with those of Orkney also, and completed 
3 



26 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

my sulvey of Scotland to the north of the Grampians ; and! 
would have reckoned at least half my self-imposed task at an 
end. "When laboring professionally, however, during the pre- 
vious winter and spring, I had, I am afraid, sometimes failed 
to remember, what the old chivalric knights used never to foi- 
get, that " man is but of mould ; " and I had, in consequence, 
subjected the "mould" to a heavier pressure than, from its 
yielding nature, it is suited to bear. And now that play-time 
had once more come round, I found I had scarce health and 
strength enough left me to carry me in quest of more. I could 
no longer undertake, as formerly, long journeys a-foot in a wild 
country, nor scramble, with sure step, and head that never 
failed, along the faces of tall precipices washed by the sea. 
And so, for the time at least, I had to give up all thought of 
visiting Orkney. 

" I will cross the Border," I said, " and get into England. 
I know the humbler Scotch better than most men, — I have at 
least enjoyed better opportunities of knowing them; but the 
humbler English I know only from hearsay. I will go and 
live among them for a few weeks, somewhere in the midland 
districts. I shall lodge in humble cottages, wear a humble 
dress, and see what is to be seen by humble men only, — 
society without its mask. I shall explore, too, for myself, the 
formations wanting in the geologic scale of Scotland, — the 
Silurian, the Chalk, and the Tertiary ; and so, should there be 
future years in store for me, I shall be enabled to resume my 
survey of our Scottish deposits with a more practised eye than 
at present, and with more extended knowledge." August was 
dragging on to its close through a moist and cloudy atmos- 
phere ; every day had its shower, and some days half a dozen 
but I hoped for clearer skies and fairer weather in the scuth 
and so, taking my seat at Edinburgh on the top of the New 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 27 

castle coach, I crossed Carter Fell a little after mid-day, and 
found myself, for the first time, in England. The sun on the 
Scottish side looked down clear and kindly on languid fields 
surcharged with moisture, that exhibited greener and yet 
greener tints as we ascended from the lowland districts to the 
uplands ; while on the southern side, though all was fair in 
the foreground, a thick sullen cloud hung low over the distant 
prospect, resembling the smoke of some vast city. 

And this was the famous Border-line, made good by the 
weaker against the stronger nation, — at how vast an amount 
of blood and suffering ! — for more than a thousand years. It 
wore to-day, in the quiet sunshine, a look of recluse tranquillity, 
that seemed wholly unconscious of the past. A tumbling sea 
of dark-green hills, delicately checkered with light and shadow, 
swelled upwards on either side towards the line of boundary, 
like the billows of opposing tide-ways, that rise over the gen- 
eral level where the currents meet ; and passing on and away 
from wave-top to wave-top, like the cork baulk of a fisherman's 
net afloat on the swell, ran the separating line. But all was 
still and motionless, as in the upper reaches of the Baltic, when 
the winter frost has set in. We passed, on the Scottish side, 
a group of stalwart shepherds, — solid, grave-featured men, 
who certainly did not look as if they loved fighting for its own 
sake ; and on the English side, drove by a few stout, ruddy 
hinds, engaged in driving carts, who seemed just as little quar- 
relsome as their Scottish neighbors. War must be intrinsically 
mischievous. It must be something very bad, let us personify 
it as proudly as we may, that could have set on these useful, 
peaceable people, — cast in so nearly the same mould, speaking 
the same tongue, possessed of the same common nature, lov- 
able, doubtless, in some points, from the development of the 
same genial affections, — to knock one another on the head, 



28 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

simp t y because the one half of them had first seen the light on 
the me side of the hill, and the other half on the other side. 
And yet, such was the state of things which obtained in this 
vvild district for many hundred years. It seems, however, 
especially well for England, since the quarrel began at all, that 
it should have been so doggedly maintained by the weaker 
people, — so well maintained that the border hamlet, round 
which they struggled, in the days of the first Edward, as a 
piece of doubtful property, is a piece of doubtful property still, 
and has, in royal proclamation and act of Parliament, its own 
separate clause assigned to it, as the " town called Berwick- 
upon-Tweed." It is quite enough for the English, as shown 
by the political history of modern times, that they conquered 
Ireland ; had they conquered Scotland also, they would have 
oeen ruined utterly. " One such victory more, and they would 
have been undone." Men have long suspected the trade of 
the hero to be a bad one ; but it is only now they are fairly 
beginning to learn, that of all great losses and misfortunes, his 
master achievement — the taking of a nation — is the greatest 
and most incurably calamitous. 

The line of boundary forms the water-shed in this part of 
the island : the streams on the Scottish side trot away north- 
wards toward the valley of the Tweed ; while on the English 
side they pursue a southerly course, and are included in the 
drainage of the Tyne. The stream which runs along the bare, 
open valley on which we had now entered, forms one of the 
larger tributaries of the latter river. But everything seemed 
as Scottish as ever, — the people, the dwelling-houses, the 
country. I could scarce realize the fact, that the little gray 
parish-church, with the square tower, which we had just passed; 
was a church in which the curate read the Prayer-book every 
Sunday, and that I had left behind me the Scottish law, under 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 29 

which I had been living all life-long till now, on the top of tho 
hill. I had proof, however, at our first English stage, that 
such was actually the case. "Is all right?" asked the coach- 
man, of a ta .1, lanky Northumbrian, who had busied himself in 
changing the horses. " Yez, all roit," was the reply ; " roit as 
the Church of England." I was, it was evident, on Presbyte- 
rian ground no longer. 

We passed, as the country began to open, a spot marked by 
two of the crossed swords of our more elaborate maps : they 
lie thick on both sides the Border, to indicate where the old 
battle-fields were stricken; and the crossed swords of this 
especial locality are celebrated in chronicle and song. A rude, 
straggling village runs for some one or two hundred yards 
along both sides of the road. On the left there is a group of 
tall trees, elevated on a ridge, which they conceal ; and a bare, 
undulating, somewhat wild country, spreads around. All is 
quiet and solitary; and no scathe on the landscape corresponds 
with the crossed swords on the map. There were a few chil- 
dren at play, as we passed, in front of one of the cottages, and 
two old men sauntering along the road. And such now is 
Otterburn, — a name I had never associated before, save with 
the two noble ditties of Chevy Chase, the magnificent narrative 
of Froissart, and the common subject of both ballads and narra- 
tive, however various their descriptions of it, — that one ster» 
night's slaughter, four hundred years ago, 

" When the dead Douglas won the field." 

It was well for the poor victors they had a Froissart to cele- 
brate them. For though it was the Scotch who gained the 
battle, it was the English who had the writing of the songs , 
and had not the victors found so impartial a chronicler in the 
generous Frenchman, the two songs, each a model in its own 



30 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

department, would have proved greatly an overmatch for them 
in the end. 

The wilder tracts of Northumberland are composed of the 
Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone; and never before had 
I seen this latter deposit developed in a style that so bears out 
the appropriateness of its name. It is in Northumberland, 
what it is rara.y or never in Scotland, a true Mountain Lime- 
stone, that rises into tall hills, and sinks into deep valleys, and 
spreads laterally over a vast extent of area. The ocean of the 
Carboniferous era in England must have been greatly more 
persistent and extended than the ocean whose deposits form 
t_ie base of the Coal Measures in the sister country : it appears 
to have lain further from the contemporary land, and to have 
been much less the subject of alternate upheavals and depres- 
sions. We were several hours in driving over the formation. 
As we entered upon the true Coal Measures, the face of the 
country at once altered : the wild, open, undulating surface 
sunk into a plain, laid out, far as the eye could reach, into 
fields closely reticulated with hedge-rows ; the farm-houses 
and gentlemen's seats thickened as we advanced ; and Eng- 
land assumed its proper character. With a change of scenery, 
however, we experienced a change of weather. We had en- 
tered into the cloud that seemed so threatening in the distance 
from the top of Carter Fell ; and a thick, soaking rain, with- 
out wind, accompanied by a lazy fog that lay scattered along 
the fields and woods in detached wreaths of gray, saddened the 
landscape. As we drove on, we could see the dense smoke of 
the pit-engines forming a new feature in the prospect ; the tall 
chimneys of Newcastle, that seemed so many soot-black obe- 
lisks, half lost in the turbid atmosphere, came next in view ; 
and then, just as the evening was falling wet and cheerless, we 
entered the town, thunugh muddy streats, and along ranges of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 31 

melancholy-locking houses, dropping from all their eaves, and 
darkened by the continuous rain of weeks. I was directed by 
the coachman to by far the most splendid temperance coffee- 
house I had ever seen ; but it seemed too fine a lodging-house 
for harboring the more characteristic English, and I had not 
crossed the Border to see cosmopolites ; and so, turning away 
from the door, I succeeded in finding for myself a humbler, 
but still very respectable house, in a different part of the town. 
There were several guests in the public room : some two or 
three smart commercial gentlemen from the midland trading 
towns; two young Sheffield mechanics, evidently of the re- 
spectable class, who earn high wages and take care of them ; 
and a farmer or two from the country. In the course of the 
evening we had a good deal of conversation, and some contro- 
versy. The mechanics were Methodists, who had availed 
themselves of a few days' leisure to see the north country, but 
more especially, as I afterwards learned, to be present at a dis- 
cussion on controverted points of theology, which was to take 
place in Newcastle on the following evening, between a pro- 
digiously clever preacher of the New Connection, very unsound 
in his creed, of whom I had never heard before, and a more 
orthodox preacher of the same body, profound in his theology, 
of whom I had heard just as little. From the peculiar empha- 
sis placed by the two lads on the word orthodox, I inferred that 
neither of them deemed orthodoxy so intellectual a thing as 
the want of it ; and I ultimately discovered that they were 
partisans of the clever preacher. One of the two seemed 
anxious to provoke a controversy on his favorite points ; but 
the commercial men, who appeared rather amused to hear so 
much about religion, avoided all definite statement ; and the 
men from the country said nothing. A person in black en- 
tered the room, — not a preacher apparently, but, had I met 



32 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 

him in Scotland, I would have set him down for at least an 
elder ; and the young mechanics were gratified. 

The man in black was, I found, a Calvinist, — not, however, 
of the most profound type ; the Methodists were wild non- 
descripts in their theology, more Socinian than aught else, and 
yet not consistently Socinian neither. A Scottish religious 
controversy of the present time regards the Tiature and extent 
of the atonement; the two Wesleyans challenged, I found, 
the very existence of the doctrine. There was really no such 
thing as an atonement, they said ; the atonement was a mere 
orthodox view taken by the Old Connection. The Calvinist 
referred to the ordinary evidences to prove it something more ; 
and so the controversy went on, with some share of perverted 
ingenuity on the one side, and a considerable acquaintance 
with Scripture doctrine on the other. A tall, respectable-look- 
ing man, with the freshness of a country life palpable about 
him, had come in shortly after the commencement of the dis- 
cussion, and took evidently some interest in it. He turned 
from speaker to speaker, and seemed employed in weighing 
the statements on both sides. At length he struck in, taking 
part against the Calvinist. "Can it really be held," he said, 
"that the all-powerful God — the Being who has no limits to 
his power — could not forgive sin without an atonement? That 
would be limiting his illimitable power with a vengeance ! " 
The remark would scarcely have arrested a theologic contro- 
versy on the same nice point in Scotland, — certainly not among 
the class of peasant controversialists so unwisely satirized by 
Burns, nor yet among the class who, in our own times, have 
taken so deep an interest in the Church question ; but the 
English Calvinist seemed unfurnished with a reply. 

I wis curious to see how the metaphysics of our Scotch 
Calvinism would tell on such an audience ; and took up the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 33 

subject much in the way it might be taken up in some country 
church-yard, ere the congregation had fully gathered, by some 
of the " grave-livers" of the parish, or as it might be discussed 
in the more northern localities of the kingdom, at some evening 
meeting of " the men." I attempted showing, step by step, 
that God did not give to himself his own nature, nor any part 
of it ; that it exists as it is, as independently of his will as our 
human nature exists as it is independently of ours ; that his 
moral nature, like his nature in general, is underived, unalter- 
able, eternal ; and that it is this underived moral nature of the 
Godhead which forms the absolute law of his conduct in all 
his dealings with his moral agents. " You are, I daresay, 
right," said the countryman ; " but how does all this bear on 
the doctrine of the atonement ? " 

"Very directly on your remark respecting it," I replied. 
" It shows us that the will and power of God, in dealing with 
the sins of his accountable creature, man, cannot, if we may 
so speak, be arbitrary, unregulated power and will, but must 
spring, of necessity, out of his underived moral nature. If it 
be according to this moral nature, which constitutes the gov- 
erning law of Deity, — the law which controls Deity, — that 
without the ' shedding of blood there can be no remission,' then 
blood must be shed, or remission cannot be obtained ; atone- 
ment for sin there must be. If, on the contrary, there can be 
remission without the shedding of blood, we may be infallibly 
certain the unnecessary blood will not be demanded, nor the 
superfluous atonement required. To believe otherwise would 
be to believe that God deals with his moral agent, man, on 
principles that do not spring out of his own moral nature, but 
are mere arbitrary results of an unregulated will." — "But are 
you not leaving the question, after all, just where you found 
it?" asked the countryman. — "Not quite," I replied: "of 



34 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

God's moral nature, or the conduct which springs out of it, we 
can but know what God 1 as been pleased to tell us : the fact 
of the atonement can be determined but. by revelation ; and 
I believe, with the gentleman opposite, that revelation deter- 
mines it very conclusively. But if fact it be, then must we 
hold that it is a fact which springs directly out of that unde- 
rived moral nature of God which constitutes the governing 
law of his power and will ; and that, his nature being what it 
is, the antagonist fact of remission without atonement is in 
reality an impossibility. Your appeal in the question lay to 
the omnipotence of God ; it is something to know that in that 
direction there can lie no appeal. Mark how strongly your 
own great poet brings out this truth. In his statement of the 
doctrine of the atonement, — a simple digest of the Scriptural 
statement, — all is made to hinge on the important fact, that 
God having once willed the salvation of men, an atonement 
became as essentially necessary to Him, in order that the moral 
nature which He did not give himself might not be violated, 
as to the lapsed race, who might recognize in it their sole hope 
of restoration and recovery. Man, says the poet, 

* To expiate his treason hath nought left, 
But to destruction, sacred and devote, 
He, with his whole posterity, must die : 
Die he, or justice must ; unless for him 
Some other, able, and as willing, pay 
The rigid satisfaction, death for death." " 

The countryman was silent. "You* Scotch are a strange 
people," said one of the commercial gentlemen. " When I 
was in Scotland two years ago, I could hear of scarce anything 
among you but your Church question. What good does all 
your theology do you?" — "Independently altogether of relig- 
ious considerations," I replied, "it has done for our people 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 35 

what all your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 
and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines, will never do 
for yours ; it has awakened their intellects, and taught them 
how to think. The development of the popular mind in Scot- 
land is a result of its theology." 

The morning rose quite as gloomily as the evening had 
fallen : the mist cloud still rested lazily over the town ; the 
rain dashed incessantly from the eaves, and streamed along the 
pavement. It was miserable weather for an invalid in quest 
of health ; but I had just to make the best I could of the cir- 
cumstances, by scraping acquaintance with the guests in the 
travellers' room, and beating with them over all manner of 
topics, until mid-day, when I sallied out, under cover of an 
umbrella, to see the town museum. I found it well suited to 
repay the trouble of a visit ; and such is the liberality of the 
Newcastle people, that it cost me no more. It is superior, 
both in the extent and arrangement of its geologic department, 
to any of our Scotch collections with which I am acquainted ; 
and its Anglo-Roman antiquities, from the proximity of the 
place to the wall of Hadrian, are greatly more numerous than 
in any other museum I ever saw, — filling, of themselves, an 
entire gallery. As I passed, in the geologic apartment, from 
the older Silurian to the newer Tertiary, and then on from the 
newer Tertiary to the votive tablets, sacrificial altars, and 
sepulchral memorials of the Anglo-Roman gallery, I could not 
help regarding them as all belonging to one department. The 
antiquities piece on in natural sequence to the geology ; and 
it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings 
regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of 
things, newer than the Tertiary, — of an extinct race, — of an 
extinct religion, — of a state of society and a class of enter- 
prises which the world saw once, but which it will never see 



36 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

again. And with I ut little assistance from the direct testimony 
of history, one has to grope one's way along this comparatively 
modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient de- 
posits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence. In at least its 
leading features, however, the story embodied is remarkably 
clear. First, we have evidence that in those remote times, 
when the northern half of the island had just become a home 
of men, the land was forest-covered, like the woody regions of 
North America, and that its inhabitants were rude savages, 
unacquainted with the metals, but possessed of a few curious 
arts which an after age forgot, — not devoid of a religion which 
at least indicated the immortality of the soul, — and much given 
to war. The extensive morass, in which huge trunks lie thick 
and frequent, — the stone battle-axe, — the flint arrow-head, — 
the Druidic circle, — the vitrified fort, — the Picts' house, — 
the canoe hollowed out of a single log, — are all fossils of this 
early period. Then come the memorials of an after formation. 
This w r ild country is invaded by a much more civilized race 
.han the one by which it is inhabited ; we find distinct marks 
jf their lines of march, — of the forests which they cut down, 
— of the encampments in which they intrenched themselves, — 
of the battle-fields in which they were met in fight by the 
natives. And they, too, had their religion. More than half 
the remains which testify to their progress consist of sacrificial 
altars, and votive tablets dedicated to the gods. The narrative 
goes on : another class of remains show us that a portion of the 
country was conquered by the civilized race. We find the re- 
mains of tesselated pavements, baths, public roads, the founda- 
tions of houses and temples, accumulations of broken pottery, 
and hoards of coin. Then comes another important clause in the 
story ; we ascertain that the civilized people failed to conquer 
the whole of the northern country ; and that, in order to pre- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 37 

ser ■ e what they had conquered, they were content to construct, 
at an immense expense of labor, a long chain of forts, con- 
nected by a strong wall flanked with towers. Had it been 
easier to conquer the rest of the country than to build the wall, 
the wall would not have been built. We learn further, how- 
ever, that the laboriously-built wall served its purpose but for 
a time : the wild people beyond at length broke over it ; and 
the civilized invader, wearied out by their persevering assaults, 
which, though repelled to-day, had again to be repelled to-mor- 
row, at length left their country to them entire, and retreating 
beyond its furthest limits, built for his protection a second wall. 
Such is the history of this bygone series of occurrences, as 
written, if one may so speak, in the various fossils of the form- 
ation. The antiquities of a museum should always piece on 
to its geologic collection.^ 

* Some of the operations of the Romans in Scotland have, like the 
catastrophes of the old geologic periods, left permanent marks on the face 
of the country. It is a curious fact, that not a few of our southern Scot- 
tish mosses owe their origin to the Roman invasion. Of their lower tiers 
of trees, — those which constituted the nucleus of the peaty formation, — 
many have been found still bearing the marks of the Roman hatchet,, — 
a thin-edged tool, somewhat like that of the American woodsman, but still 
narrower. In some instances the axe-head, sorely wasted, has been 
detected still sticking in the buried stump, which is generally found to 
have been cut several feet over the soil, just where the tool might be plied 
with most effect; and in many, Roman utensils and coins have been dis- 
covered, where they had been hastily laid down by the soldiery among the 
tangled brushwood, and forthwith covered up and lost. Rennie, in his 
" Essay on Peat Moss," furnishes an interesting list of these curiosities, 
that tell so significant a story. "In Ponsil Moss, near Glasgow," he 
says, " a leather bag, containing about two hundred silver coins of Rome, 
was found ; in Dundaff Moor, a number of similar coins were found about 
forty years ago; in Annan Moss, near the Roman Causeway, an ornament 
of pure gold was discovered; a Roman camp-kettle was found, eight feet 
deep, under a moss, on the estate of Ochtertyre; in Flanders Moss a sim- 
ilar utensil was found; a Roman jug was found in Locker Moss, Dum- 
4 



38 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

The weather was still wretchedly bad ; but I got jpon the 
Great Southern Railway, and passed on to Durham, expecting 
to see, in the city of a bishop, a quiet English town cjf the true 
ancient type. And so I would have done, as the close-piled 
tenements of antique brick-work, with their secluded old-fash- 
ioned courts and tall fantastic gables, testified in detail, had 
the circumstances been more favorable; but the mist-cloud 
hung low, and I could see little else than dropping eaves, dark 
ened walls, and streaming pavements. The river which sweeps 
past the town was big in flood. I crossed along the bridge ; 
saw beyond, a half-drowned country, rich in fields and woods, 
and varied by the reaches of the stream ; and caught between 
me and the sky, when the fog rose, the outline of the town on 
its bold ridge, with its stately cathedral elevated highest, as 
first in place, and its grotesque piles of brick ranging adown 
the slope in picturesque groups, continuous yet distinct. I 
next visited the cathedral. The gloomy day was darkening 
into still gloomier evening, and I found the huge pile standing 
up amid the descending torrents in its ancient grave-yard, like 
some mass of fretted rock-work enveloped in the play of a 
fountain. The great door lay open, but I could see little else 
within than the ranges of antique columns, curiously moulded, 

friesshire; a pot and decanter, of Koman copper, was found in a moss in 
Kirkmichael parish in the same county; and two vessels, of Roman 
bronze, in the Moss of Glanderhill, in Strathaven." And thus the list 
runs on. It is not difficult to conceive how, in the circumstances, mosses 
came to be formed. The felled wood was left to rot on the surface ; small 
streams were choked up in the levels ; pools formed in the hollows ; the 
soil beneath, shut up from the light and the air, became unfitted to pro- 
duce its former vegetation: but a new order of plants, — the thick water- 
mosses, — began to spring up; one generation budded and decayed over 
the ruins of another ; and what had been an overturned forest, became, in 
the course of years, a deep morass, — an unsightly but permanent monu- 
ment of the formidable invader. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 39 

and of girth enormous, that separate the aisles from the nave ; 
and, hall lost in the blackness, they served to remind me this 
evening of the shadowy, gigantic colonnades of Martin. Their 
Saxon strength wore, amid the vagueness of the gloom, an air 
of Babylonish magnificence. 

The rain was dashing amid the tombstones outside. One 
antique slab of blue limestone beside the pathway had been 
fretted many centuries ago into the lude semblance of a human 
figure ; but the compact mass, unfaithful to its charge, had 
resigned all save the general outline; the face was worn 
smooth, and only a few nearly obliterated ridges remained, to 
indicate the foldings of the robe. It served to show, in a 
manner sufficiently striking, how much more indelibly nature 
inscribes her monuments of the dead than art. The limestone 
slab had existed as a churchyard monument for perhaps a 
thousand years ; but the story which it had been sculptured to 
tell had been long since told for the last time ; and whether it 
had marked out the burial-place of priest or of layman, or what 
he had been or done, no one could now determine. But the 
story of an immensely earlier sepulture, — earlier, mayhap, by 
thrice as many twelvemonths as the thousand years contained 
days, — it continued to tell most distinctly. It told that when 
it had existed as a calcareous mud deep in the carboniferous 
ocean, a species of curious zoophyte, long afterwards termed 
Gyathophyllum fimgites, were living and dying by myriads ; 
and it now exhibited on its surface several dozens of them, cut 
open at every possible angle, and presenting every variety of 
section, as if to show what sort of creatures they had been. The 
glossy wet served as a varnish ; and I could see that not only 
had those larger plates of the skeletons that radiate outwards 
from the centre been preserved, but even the microscopic retic- 
ulations Ox the cross partitioning. Never was there ancient 



40 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

inscription held in such faithful keeping by the founder's 
bronze or the s:ulptor's marble ; and never was there epitaph of 
human composition so scrupulously just to the real character 
of the dead. 

I found three guests in the coffee-house in which I lodged, — 
a farmer and his two sons : the farmer still in vigorous middle 
life ; the sons robust and tall ; all of them fine specimens of 
the ruddy, well-built, square-shouldered Englishman. They 
had been travelling by the railway, and were now on their 
return to their farm, which lay little more than two hours' walk 
away ; but so bad was the evening, that they had deemed it 
rdvisable to take beds for the night in Durham. They had 
svidently a stake in the state of the weather ; and as the rain 
ever and anon pattered against the panes, as if on the eve of 
breaking them, some one or other of the three would rise to the 
window, and look moodily out into the storm. " God help us ! " 
I heard the old farmer ejaculate, as the rising wind shook the 
casement ; " we shall have no harvest at all." They had had 
rain, I learned, in this locality, with but partial intermissions, 
for the greater part of six weeks, and the crops lay rotting on 
the ground. In the potatoes served at table I marked a pecu- 
liar appearance : they were freckled over by minute circular 
spots, that bore a ferruginous tinge, somewhat resembling the 
specks on iron-shot sandstone, and they ate as if but partially 
boiled. I asked the farmer whether the affection was a com- 
mon one in that part of the country. " Not at all," was the 
reply : " we never saw it before ; but it threatens this year to 
destroy our potatoes. The half of mine it has spoiled already, 
and it spreads among them every day." It does not seem 
natural to the species to associate mighty consequences with 
phenomena that wear a very humble aspect. The teachings of 
experience are essentially necessary to show us that the seeds of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 41 

great events may be little things in themselves ; and so I could 
not see how important a part these minute iron-tinted specks — 
the work of a microscopic fungus — were to enact in British 
nistory. The old soothsayers professed to read the destinies 
of the future in very unlikely pages, — in the meteoric appear- 
ances of the heavens, and in the stars, — in the flight and 
chirping of birds, — in the entrails of animals, — in many other 
strange characters besides ; and in the remoter districts of my 
own country I have seen a half-sportive superstition employed 
in deciphering characters quite as unlikely as those of the old 
augurs, — in the burning of a brace of hazel-nuts, — in the 
pulling of a few oaten stalks, — in the grounds of a tea-cup, — 
above all, in the Hallowe'en egg, in which, in a different sense 
from that embodied in the allegory of Cowley, 

• 

" The curious eye, 

Through the firm shell and the thick white may spy 

Years to come a-forming lie, 

Close in their sacred secundine asleep." 

But who could have ever thought of divining over the spotted 
tubers ? or who so shrewd as to have seen in the grouping of 
their iron-shot specks Lord John Russell's renunciation of the 
fixed duty, — the conversion to free-trade principles of Sir 
Robert Peel and his Conservative ministry, — the breaking up 
into sections of the old Protectionist party, — and, in the remote 
distance, the abolition in Scotland of the law of entail, and in 
England the ultimate abandonment, mayhap, of the depressing 
tenant-at-will system ? If one could have read them aright, 
never did the flight of bird or the embowelment of beast indi- 
cate so wonderful a story. as these same iron-shot tubers. 
4* 



42 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER II 

Weather sti .1 miserably bad ; suited to betray t ae frequent Poverty of 
English Landscape. — Gloomy Prospects of the Agriculturist. — Corn- 
Law League. — York ; a true Sacerdotal City. — Cathedral ; noble Ex- 
terior ; Interior not less impressive ; Congreve's sublime Description. — 
Unpardonable Solecism. — Procession. — Dean Cocldrurn ; Crusade 
against the Geologists. — Cathedral Service unworthy of the Cathedral. 
— Walk on the City Ramparts. — Flat Fertility of the surrounding 
Country. — The more interesting Passages in the History of York sup- 
plied by the Makers. — Robinson Crusoe. — Jeanie Deans. — Trial of 
Eugene Aram. — Aram's real Character widely different from that drawn 
by the Novelist. 

Rain, rain ! — another morning in England, and still no 
improvement in the weather. The air, if there was any change 
at all, felt rather more chill and bleak than on the previous 
evening ; and the shower, in its paroxysms, seemed to beat still 
heavier on the panes. I was in no mood to lay myself up in a 
dull inn, like Washington Irving's stout gentleman, and so took 
the train for York, in the hope of getting from under the cloud 
somewhere on its southern side, ere I at least reached the 
British Channel. Never surely was the north of England seen 
more thoroughly in dishabille. The dark woods and thick-set 
hedgerows looked blue and dim through the haze, like the 
mimic woodlands of a half-finished drawing in gray chalk; 
and, instead of cheering, added but to the gloom of the land- 
scape. They seemed to act the part of mere sponges, that firsj 
condensed and then retained the moisture, — that became soaked 
in the shower, and then, when it had passed, continued dis- 
pensing their droppings on the rotting sward beneath, until 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 43 

another she- ver came. The character of the weather was of a 
kind suited to betray the frequent poverty of English land- 
scape. When the sky is clear and the sun bright, even the 
smallest and tamest patches of country have their charms : 
there is beauty in even a hollow willow pollard fluttering its 
silvery leaves over its patch of meadow-sedges against the deep 
blue of the heavens ; but in the dull haze and homogeneous 
light, that was but light and shadow muddled into a neutral 
tint of gray, one could not now and then avoid remarking that 
the entire prospect consisted of but one field and two hedge- 
rows. 

As we advanced, appearances did not improve. The wheaten 
fields exhibited, for their usual golden tint slightly umbered, an 
ominous tinge of earthy brown ; the sullen rivers had risen high 
over the meadows ; and rotting hay-ricks stood up like islands 
amid the water. At one place in the line the train had to drag 
its weary length in foam and spray, up to the wheel-axles, 
through the overflowings of a neighboring canal. The sudden 
shower came ever and anon beating against the carriage win- 
dows, obscuring yet more the gloomy landscape without; and 
the passengers were fain to shut close every opening, and to 
draw their great-coats and wrappers tightly around them, as 
if they had been journeying, not in the month of August, 
scarcely a fortnight after the close of the dog-days, but at 
Christmas. I heard among the passengers a few semi-political 
remarks, suggested by the darkening prospects of the agricul- 
turist. The Anti-Corn-Law League, with all its formidable 
equipments, had la.n for years, as if becalmed in its voyage, a 
water-logged hulk, that failed to press on towards its port of 
destination. One good harvest after another had, as sailors 
say, taken the wind out of its sails ; and now here evidently 
was there a strong gale arising full in its poop. It was palpa- 



44 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

bly on the eve of making great way in its course ; and the few 
political remarks which I heard bore reference to the fact. But 
they elicited no general sympathy. The scowling heavens, the 
blackening earth, the swollen rivers, the ever-returning shower- 
blast, with its sharp-ringing patter, were things that had nought 
of the gayety of political triumph in them ; and the more solid 
English, however favorable to free trade, could not deem it a 
cause of gratulation that for so many weeks " the sun, and 
the light, and the stars, had been darkened, and the clouds 
returned after the rain." The general feeling seemed not 
inadequately expressed by a staid elderly farmer, with whom 1 
afterwards travelled from York to Manchester. " I am sure," 
he said, looking out into the rain, which was beating at the 
time with great violence, — "I am sure I wish the League no 
harm ; but Heaven help us and the country, if there is to be 
no harvest ! The League will have a dear triumph, if God 
destroy the fruits of the earth." 

Old sacerdotal York, with its august cathedral, its twenty- 
three churches in which Divine service is still performed, its 
numerous ecclesiastical ruins besides, — monasteries, abbeys, 
hospitals and chapels, — at once struck me as different from 
anything I had ever seen before. St. Andrews, one of the two 
ancient archiepiscopal towns of Scotland, may have somewhat 
resembled it on a small scale in the days of old Cardinal Bea- 
ton ; but the peculiar character of the Scottish Reformation 
rendered it impossible that the country should possess any 
such ecclesiastical city ever after. Modern improvement has 
here and there introduced more of its commonplace barbarisms 
into the busier and the genteeler streets than the antiquary 
would have bargained for ; it has been rubbing off the venera- 
ble rust, somewhat in the style adopted by the serving-maid, 
who scoured the old Roman buckler with sand and water till it 



ExXGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 45 

sh :me : but York is essentially an ancient city still. One may 
stiU walk round it on the ramparts erected in the times of 
Edward the First, and tell all their towers, bars, and barba- 
cans ; and in threading one's way along antique lanes, flanked 
by domiciles of mingled oak and old brick-work, that belly over 
like the sides of ships, and were tenanted in the days of the 
later Henrys, one stumbles unexpectedly on rectories that have 
their names recorded in Doomsday Book, and churches that 
were built before the Conquest. My first walk through the 
city terminated, as a matter of course, at the cathedral, so 
famous for its architectural magnificence and grandeur. It is 
a noble pile, — one of the sublimest things wrought by human 
hands which the island contains. As it rose gray and tall 
before me in the thickening twilight, — for another day had 
passed, and another evening was falling, — I was conscious of 
a more awe-struck and expansive feeling than any mere work 
of art had ever awakened in me before. The impression more 
resembled what I have sometimes experienced on some solitary 
ocean shore, o'erhung by dizzy precipices, and lashed high by 
the foaming surf; or beneath the craggy brow of some vast 
mountain, that overlooks, amid the mute sublimities of nature, 
some far-spread uninhabited wilderness of forest and moor. 
I realized better than ever before the justice of the eulogium 
of Thomson on the art of the architect, and recognized it as in 
reality 

" The art where most magnificent appears 
The little builder man." 

It was too late to gain admission to the edifice, and far too 
late to witness the daily service ; and I was desirous to see not 
only the stately temple itself, but \he worship performed in it. 
I spent, however, an hour in wandering round it, — in marking 
the effect on buttress and pinnacle, turret and arch, of the still 



46 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

deepening shadows, and in catching the general outline be 
tween me and the sky. The night had set fairly in long ere 1 
reached my lodging-house. York races had just begun ; and, 
bad as the weather was, there was so considerable an influx of 
strangers into the town, that there were few beds in the inns 
unoccupied, and I had to content myself with the share of a 
bed-room in which there were two. My co-partner in the 
room came in late and went away early ; and all I know of 
him, or shall perhaps ever know, is, that after having first 
ascertained, not very correctly, as it proved, that I was asleep, 
he prayed long and earnestly ; that, as I afterwards learned 
from the landlord, he was a Wesleyan Methodist, who had 
come from the country, not to attend the races, for he was not 
one of the race-frequenting sort of people, but on some busi- 
ness ; and that he was much respected in his neighborhood for 
the excellence of his character. 

Next morning I attended service in the cathedral ; and being, 
I found, half an hour too early, spent the interval not unpleas- 
antly in pacing the aisles and nave, and studying the stories 
so doubtfully recorded on the old painted glass. As I stood 
at the western door, and saw the noble stone roof stretching 
away more than thirty yards overhead, in a long vista of five 
hundred feet, to the great eastern window, I again experienced 
the feeling of the previous evening. Never before had I seen 
so noble a cover. The ornate complexities of the groined 
vaulting, — the giant columns, with their foliage-bound capi- 
tals, sweeping away in magnificent perspective, — the colored 
light that streamed throjigh more than a hundred huge win- 
dows, and but faintly illumined the vast area, after all, — the 
deep withdi awing aisles, with their streets of tombs, — the 
great tower, mder which a ship of the line might hoist top and 
top-gallant mast, and find ample room overhead for the play 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 47 

of her vane, — the felt combination of great age and massive 
durability, that made the passing hour in the history of the 
edifice but a mere half-way point between the centuries of the 
past and the centuries of the future, — all conspired to render 
the interior of York Minster one of the most impressive objects 
I had ever seen. Johnson singles out Congreve's description 
of a similar pile as one of the finest in the whole range of Eng- 
lish poetry. It is at least description without exaggeration, in 
reference to buildings such as this cathedral. 

" Almeria. It was a fancied noise; for all is hushed. 

Leonora. It bore the accent of a human voice. 

Almeria. It was thy fear, or else some transient wind 
Whistling through hollows of this vaulted aisle. 
We '11 listen — 

Leonora. Hark ! 

Almeria. No, all is hushed and still as death : 'tis dreadful. 
How reverend is the face of this tall pile, 
Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, 
To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, 
By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, — 
Looking tranquillity ! It strikes an awe 
And terror on the aching sight : the tombs 
And monumental caves of death look cold, 
And shoot a dullness to the trembling heart. 
Give me thy hand, and let me hear thy voice; 
Nay, quickly speak to me, and let me hear 
Thy voice : my own affrights me with its echoes." 

But though I felt the poetry of the edifice, so little had my 
Presbyterian education led me to associate the not unelevated 
impulses of the feeling with the devotional spirit, that, cer- 
tainly without intending any disrespect to either the national 
religion or one of the noblest ecclesiastical building? of Eng 
land, I had failed to uncover my head, and was quite unaware 
of the gross solecism I was committing, until two of the offi- 



48 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

cials, who had just ranged themselves in iront of the organ- 
screen, to usher the dean and choristers into the choir, started 
forward, one from each side of the door, and, with no little 
gesticulatory emphasis, ordered me to take off my hat. " Off 
hat, sir! off hat! " angrily exclaimed the one. " Take off your 
hat, sir ! " said the other, in a steady, energetic, determined 
tone, still less resistible. The peccant beaver at once sunk by 
my side, and I apologized. "Ah, a Scotchman ! " ejaculated 
the keener official of the two, his cheek meanwhile losing some 
of the hastily-summoned red ; " I thought as much." The 
officials had scarcely resumed their places beside the screen, 
when Dean and Sub-dean, the Canons Eesidentiary and the 
Archdeacon, the Prebendaries and the Vicars Choral, entered 
the building in their robes, and, with step slow and stately, 
disappeared through the richly-fretted entrance of the choir. 
A purple curtain fell over the opening behind them, as the last 
figure in the procession passed in ; while a few lay saunterers, 
who had come to be edified by the great organ, found access 
by another door, which opened into one of the aisles. 

The presiding churchman, on the occasion, was Dean Cock- 
burn, — a tall, portly old man, fresh-complexioned and silvery- 
haired, and better fitted than most men to enact the part of an 
imposing figure in a piece of impressive ceremony. I looked 
at the dean with some little interest ; he had been twice before 
the public during the previous five years, — once as a dealer 
in church offices, for which grave offence he had been deprived 
by his ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop, but reponed by 
the queen, — and once as a redoubtable asserter of what he 
deemed Bible cosmogony, against the facts of the geologists. 
The old blood-boltered barons who lived in the times of the 
Crusades used to make all square with Heaven, w T hen particu- 
larly aggrieved in their consciences, by slaying a few scores of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 49 

■nfidels a-piece ; — the dean had fallen, it would seem, in these 
latter days, on a similar mode of doing penance, and expiated 
the crime of making canons residentiary for a consideration, by 
demolishing a whole conclave of geologists. 

The cathedral service seemed rather a poor thing, on the 
whole. The coldly-read or fantastically-chanted prayers, com- 
monplace by the twice-a-day repetition of centuries, — the 
mechanical responses, — the correct inanity of the choristers, 
who had not even the life of music in them, — the total want 
of lay attendance, for the loungers who had come in by the 
side-door went off en masse when the organ had performed its 
introductory part, and the prayers began, — the ranges of 
empty seats, which, huge as is the building which contains 
them, would scarce accommodate an average-sized Free Church 
congregation, — all conspired to show that the cathedral service 
of the English Church does not represent a living devotion, but 
a devotion that perished centuries ago. It is a petrifaction, — 
a fossil, — existing, it is true, in a fine state of keeping, but 
still an exanimate stone. Many ages must have elapsed since 
it was the living devotion I had witnessed on the previous eve- 
ning in the double-bedded room, — if, indeed, it was ever so 
living a devotion, or aught, at best, save a mere painted image. 
Not even as a piece of ceremonial is it in keeping with the 
august edifice in which it is performed. The great organ does 
its part admirably, and is indisputably a noble machine ; its 
thirty-two feet double-wood diapason pipe, cut into lengths, 
would make coffins for three Goliahs of Gath, brass armor and 
all : but the merely human part of the performance is redolent 
of none of the poetry which plays around the ancient walls, or 
streams through the old painted glass. It reminded me of the 
story told by the eastern traveller, who, in exploring a magnifi- 
cent temple, passed through superb porticoes and noble halls, 
5 



50 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

to find a monkey enthroned in a little dark sanctum, as the 
god of the whole. 

I had a long and very agreeable walk along the c.ty ram- 
parts. White watery clouds still hung in the sky ; but the 
day was decidedly fine, and dank fields and glistening hedge- 
rows steamed merrily in the bright warm sunshine. York, 
like all the greater towns of England, if we except the capital 
and some two or three others, stands on the New Ked Sand- 
stone ; and the broad extent of level fertility which it commands 
is, to a Scotch eye, very striking. There is no extensive pros- 
pect in even the south of Scotland that does not include its 
wide ranges of waste, and its deep mountain sides, never fur- 
rowed by the plough ; while in our more northern districts, one 
sees from every hill-top which commands the coast a land- 
scape colored somewhat like a russet shawl with a flowered 
border ; — there is a mere selvage of green cultivation on the 
edge of the land, and all within is brown heath and shaggy 
forest. In England, on the contrary, one often travels, stage 
after stage, through an unvarying expanse of flat fields laid out 
on the level formations, which, undisturbed by trappean or 
metamorphic rocks, stretch away at low angles for hundreds 
of miles together, forming blank tablets, on which man may 
write his works in whatever characters he pleases. Doubtless 
such a disposition of things adds greatly to the wealth and 
power of a country ; — the population of Yorkshire, at the last 
census, equalled that of Scotland in 1801. But I soon began 
to weary of an infinity of green enclosures, that lay spreac out 
in undistinguishable sameness, like a net, on the flat face of 
the landscape, and to long for the wild free moors and bold 
natural features of my own poor country. One likes tc know 
the place of one's birth by other than artificial marks : by 
some hoary mountain, severe yet kindly in its aspect, that one 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 51 

has learned to love as a friend ; by some long withdrawing 
arm of the sea, sublimely guarded, where it opens to the ocean, 
by its magnificent portals of rock; by some wild range of 
precipitous coast, that rears high its ivy-bound pinnacles, and 
where the green wave ever rises and falls along dim resound- 
ing caverns; by some lonely glen, with its old pine forests 
hanging dark on the slopes, and its deep-brown river roaring 
over linn and shallow in its headlong course to the sea. Who 
could fight for a country without features, — that one would 
scarce be sure of finding out on one's return from the battle, 
without the assistance of the mile-stones ? 

As I looked on either hand from the ancient ramparts, now 
down along the antique lanes and streets of the town, now over 
the broad level fields beyond, I was amused to think how entirely 
all my more vivid associations with York — town and country 
— had been derived from works of fiction. True, it was curi- 
ous enough to remember, as a historical fact, that Christianity 
had been preached here to the pagan Saxons in the earlier 
years of the Heptarchy, by missionaries from Iona. And there 
are not a few other picturesque incidents, that, frosted over 
with the romance of history, glimmer with a sort of phosphoric 
radiance in the records of the place, — from the times when 
King Edwyn of the Northumbrians demolished the heathen 
temple that stood where the cathedral now stands, and erected 
in its room the wooden oratory in which he was baptized, down 
to the times when little crooked Leslie broke over the city 
walls at the head of his Covenanters, and held them against 
the monarch, in the name of the king. But the historical 
facts have vastly less of the vividness of truth about them than 
the facts of the makers. It was in this city of York that the 
famous Robinson Crusoe was born ; arad here, in this city of 
York, did Jeanie Deans rest her for a day, on her Londcn 



52 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

journey, with her hospitable countrywoman, Mrs. Bickerton of 
the Seven Stars; and it was in the country beyond, down in 
the West Riding, thit Gurth and Wamba held high colloquy 
together, among the glades of the old oak forest; and that 
Cedric the Saxon entertained, in his low-browed hall of Roth- 
erwood, the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Prior Aymer 
of Jorvaulx. 

I visited the old castle, now a prison, and the town mu- 
seum, and found the geological department of the latter at 
once very extensive and exquisitely arranged ; but the fact, 
announced in the catalogue, that it had been laid out under 
the eye of Phillips, while it left me much to admire in the 
order exhibited, removed at least all cause of wonder I con- 
cluded the day — the first very agreeable one 1 had spent in 
England — by a stroll along the banks of the Ouse, through a 
colonnade of magnificent beeches. The sun was hastening to 
its setting, and the red light fell, with picturesque effect, on 
the white sails of a handsome brig, that came speeding up the 
river, through double rows of tall trees, before a light wind 
from the east. On my return to my lodging-house, through 
one of the obscure lanes of the city, I picked up, at a book-stall, 
what I deemed no small curiosity, — the original " Trial of 
Eugene Aram," well known in English literature as the hero 
of one of Bulwer's most popular novels, and one of Hood's 
most finished poems, and for as wonderful a thing as either, 
his own remarkable defence. I had never before seen so full 
an account of the evidence on which he was condemned, nor 
of the closing scene in his singular history ; nor was I aware 
there existed such competent data for forming an adequate 
estimate of his character, which, by the way, seems to have 
been not at all the character drawn by Bulwer. Knares- 
borough, the scene of Aram's crime, may be seen from the bat- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 53 

tlemeU s of York Minster. In York Castle he was imprisoned, 
and wrote his Defence and his Autobiography; at York 
Assizes he was tried and convicted ; and on York gallows he 
was hung. The city is as intimately associated with the clos- 
ing scenes in his history, as with the passing visit of Jeanie 
Deans, or the birth of Robinson Crusoe. But there is this 
important difference in the cases, that the one story has found a 
place in literature from the strangely romantic cast of its facts, 
and the others from the intensely truthful air of their fictions. 
Eugene Aram seems not to have been the high heroic char- 
acter conceived by the novelist, — not a hero of tragedy at all, 
nor a hero of any kind, but simply a poor egotistical litterateur, 
with a fine intellect set in a very inferior nature. He repre- 
sents the extreme type of unfortunately a numerous class, — 
the men of vigorous talent, in some instances of fine genius, 
who, though they can think much and highly of themselves, 
seem wholly unable to appreciate their true place and work, or 
the real dignity of their standing, and so are continually get- 
ting into false, unworthy positions, — in some instances falling 
into little meannesses, in others into contemptible crimes. I 
am afraid it is all too evident that even the sage Bacon be- 
longed to this class ; and there can be little doubt that, though 
greatly less a criminal, the elegant and vigorous poet who 
described him as 

" The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind," 

belonged to it also. The phosphoric light of genius, that 
throws so radiant a gloom athwart the obscurities of nature, 
has in some cises been carried by a frivolous insect, in some 
by a creeping worm : there are brilliant intellects of the fire-fly 
and of the glow-worm class ; and poor Eugene Aram was one 
of them. In his character, as embodied in the evidence on 
5* 



54 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

which he vas convicted and condemned, we see merely that 
of a felo.. of the baser sort: a man who associated with low 
companions ; married a low wife ; entered into low sharping 
schemes with a poor dishonest creature, whom, early in his 
career he used to accompany at nights in stealing flower-roots, 
— for they possessed in common a taste for gardening, — and 
whom he afterwards barbarously murdered, to possess himself 
of a few miserable pounds, — the proceeds of a piece of dis- 
reputable swindling, to which he had prompted him. Viewed, 
however, in another phase, we find that this low felon possessed 
one of those vigorous intellectual natures that, month after 
month, and year after year, steadily progress in acquirement, 
as the forest-tree swells in bulk of trunk and amplitude of 
bough; till, at length, with scarce any educational advantages, 
there was no learned language which he had not mastered, and 
scarce a classic author which he had not read. And, finally, 
when the learned felon came to make his defence, all Britain 
was astonished by a piece of pleading that, for the elegance of 
the composition and the vigor of the thought, would have done 
no discredit to the most accomplished writers of the day. The 
defence of Eugene Aram, if given to the public among the 
defences, and under the name, of Thomas Lord Erskine, so 
celebrated for this species of composition, would certainly not 
be deemed unworthy of the collection or its author. There 
can be no question that the Aram of Bulwer is a well-drawn 
character, and rich in the picturesque of tragic effect ; but the 
exhibition is neither so melancholy nor so instructive as that 
of the Eugene Aram who w r as executed at York for murder in 
the autumn of 1759, and his body afterwards hung in chains at 
" the place called St. Eobert's Cave, near Knaresborough." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 55 



CHAPTER III. 

ftuit York for Mart.iester. — A Character. — Quaker Laay. — Peculiar 
Feature in the Husbandry of the Cloth District. — Leeds. — Simplicity 
manifested in the Geologic Framework of English Scenery. — The De- 
nuding Agencies almost invariably the sole Architects of the Landscape. 

— Manchester ; characteristic Peculiarities ; the Irwell ; Collegiate 
Church; light and elegant Proportions of the Building; its grotesque 
Sculptures ; these indicative of the Scepticism of the Age in which they 
were produced. — St. Bartholomew's Day. — Sermon on Saints' Day. 

— Timothy's Grandmother. — The Puseyite a High Churchman become 
earnest. — Passengers of a Sunday Evening Train. — Sabbath Amuse- 
ments not very conducive to Happiness. — The Economic Value of the 
Sabbath ill understood by the Utilitarian. — Testimony of History on 
the point. 

On the following morning I quitted York for Manchester, 
taking Leeds in my way. I had seen two of the ecclesiastical 
cities of Old England, and I was now desirous to visit two of 
the great trading towns of the modern country, so famous for 
supplying with its manufactures half the economic wants of 
the world. 

At the first stage from York," we were joined by a young- 
lady passenger, of forty or thereabouts, evidently a character. 
She was very gaudily dressed, and very tightly laced, and had 
a bloom of red in her cheeks that seemed to have been just a 
little assisted by art, and a bloom of red in her nose that seemed 
not to have been assisted by art at all. Alarmingly frank and 
portentously talkative, she at once threw herself for protection 
and guidance on " the gentlemen." She had to get down at 
one of the intermediate stages, she said ; but were she to be so 
101% ky as to pass it, she would not know what to do, — she 



56 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

wou d be at iier wit's end ; but she trusted she would not be 
permitted to pass it : she threw herself upon the generosity of 
the gentlemen, — she always did, indeed ; and she trusted the 
generous gentlemen would inform her, when she came to her 
stage, that it was time for her to get out. f had rarely seen, 
except in old play-books, written when our dramatists of the 
French school were drawing ladies '-maids of the time of 
Charles the Second, a character of the kind quite so stage-like 
in its aspect; and in a quiet way was enjoying the exhibition. 
And the passenger who sat fronting me in the carriage — an 
elderly lady of the Society of Friends — was, I found, enjoy- 
ing it quite as much and as quietly as myself. A countenance 
of much transparency, that had been once very pretty, exhibited 
at every droll turn in the dialogue the appropriate expression. 
Remarking to a gentleman beside me that good names were 
surely rather a scant commodity in England, seeing they had 
not a few towns and rivers, which, like many of the American 
ones, seemed to exist in duplicate and triplicate, — they had 
three Newcastles, and four Stratfords, and at least two river 
Ouses, — I asked him how I could travel most directly by rail- 
way to Cowper's Ouse. He did not know, he said; he had 
never heard of a river Ouse except the Yorkshire one, which I 
had just seen. The Quaker lady supplied me with the inform- 
ation I wanted, by pointing out the best route to Olney ; and 
the circumstance led to a conversation which only terminated 
at our arrival at Leeds. I found her possessed, like many of 
the Society of Friends, whom Howitt so well describes, of 
literary taste, conversational ability, and extensive information ; 
and we expatiated together over a wide range. We discussed 
English poets and poetry ; compared notes regarding our crit- 
ical formulas and canons, and found them wonderfully alike ; 
beat over the Scottish Church question, and some dozen or so 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 57 

other questions besides; and at parting, she invited me to visit 
her at her house in Bedfordshire, within half a day's journey 
of Olney. She was at present residing with a friend, she said ; 
but she would be at home in less than a fortnight ; and there 
was much in her neighborhood which, she was sure, it would 
give me pleasure to see. I was unable ultimately to avail 
myself of her kindness ; but in the hope that these chapters 
may yet meet her eye, 1 must be permitted to reiterate my 
sincere thanks for her frank and hospitable invitation. The 
frankness struck me at the time as characteristically English ; 
while the hospitality associated well with all I had previously 
known of the Society of Friends. 

I marked, in passing on to Leeds, a new feature in the hus- 
bandry of the district, — whole fields of teazles, in flower at the 
time, waving gray in the breeze. They indicated that I was 
approaching the great centre of the cloth-trade in England. 
The larger heads of this plant, bristling over with their numer- 
ous minute hooks, are employed as a kind of brushes or combs 
for raising the nap of the finer broadcloths ; and it seems a 
curious enough circumstance that, in this mechanical age, so 
famous for the ingenuity and niceness of its machines, no effort 
of the mechanician has as yet enabled him to supersede, or even 
to rival, this delicate machine of nature's making. I failed to 
acquaint myself very intimately with Leeds : the rain had 
again returned, after a brief interval of somewhat less that two 
days ; and I saw, under cover of my old friend the umbrella, 
but the outsides of the two famous cloth-halls of the place, 
where there are more woollen stuffs bought and sold than in 
any other dozer buildings in the world ; and its long uphill- 
street of shops, with phlegmatic Queen Anne looking grimly 
adown the slope, from her niche of dingy sandstone. On the 
folbwing morning, which was wet and stormy as ever, I took 



58 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the railway train for Manchester, which I reached a little after 
mid-day. 

In passing through Northumberland, I had quitted the hilly 
district when I quitted the Mountain Limestone and Millstone 
Grit ; and now, in travelling on to Manchester, I had, I found, 
again got into a mountainous, semi-pastoral country. There 
were deep green valleys, traversed by lively tumbling streams, 
that opened on either hand among the hills ; and the course of 
the railway train was, for a time, one of great vicissitude, — 
now elevated high on an embankment, now burrowing deep 
in a tunnel. It is, the traveller finds, the same Millstone Grit 
and Mountain Limestone which form the hilly regions of Nor- 
thumberland, that give here their hills and valleys to Lanca- 
shire and the West Riding of Yorkshire ; and that, passing on 
to Derby, in the general south-western range of the English 
formations, compose the Peak, so famous for its many caves 
and chasms, with all the picturesque groups of eminences that 
surround it. There are few things which so strike the Scotch 
geologist who visits England for the first time, as the simplicity 
with which he finds he can resolve the varying landscape into 
its geologic elements. The case is different in Scotland, where 
he has to deal, in almost every locality, with both the denuding 
and the Plutonic agents, and where, as in the neighborhood 
of Edinburgh, many independent centres of internal action, 
grouped closely together, connect the composition of single 
prospects with numerous and very varied catastrophes. But 
in most English landscapes one has to deal with the denuding 
agents alone. In passing along an open sea-coast, on which 
strata of the Secondary or Palaeozoic formations have been laid 
bare, one finds that the degree of prominence exhibited by the 
bars and ridges of rock exposed to the waves corresponds 
always with their degree of tenacity and hardness. A bed of 



ENGLaND AND ITS PEOPLE. 59 

soft Siiale or clay we fin a represented by a hollow trough ; the 
surf has worn it down till it can no longer be seen, and a strip 
of smooth gravel rests over it ; a stratum of sandstone, of the 
average solidity, rises above the hollow like a mole, for the 
waves have failed to wear the sandstone down ; while a band 
of limestone or chert we find rising still higher, because still 
better suited, from its great tenacity, to resist the attrition of 
the denuding agents. And such, on a great scale, is the prin- 
ciple of what one may term the geologic framework of English 
landscape. The softer formations of the country we find repre- 
sented, like the shale-beds on the shore, by wide flat valleys or 
extensive plains ; the harder, by chains of hills of greater or 
lesser altitude, according to the degree of solidity possessed by 
the composing material. A few insulated districts of country, 
such as part of North Wales, Westmoreland, and Cornwall, 
where the Plutonic agencies have been active, we find coming 
under the more complex law of Scottish landscape ; but in all 
the rest, — save where here and there a minute trappean patch 
imparts its inequalities to the surface, as in the Dudley coal- 
field, — soft or hard, solid or incoherent, determines the ques- 
tion of high or low, bold or tame. Here, for instance, is a 
common map of England, on which the eminences are marked, 
but not the geologic formations. These, however, we may 
almost trace by the chains of hills, or from the want of them. 
This hilly region, for instance, which extends from the northern 
borders of Northumberland to Derby, represents the Millstone 
Grit and Mountain Limestone, — solid deposits of indurated 
sandstone and crystalline lime, that stand up amid the land- 
scape like the harder strata on the wave-worn sea-coast. On 
both sides of this mountainous tract there are level plains of 
vast extent, that begin to form on the one side near Newcastle, 
and at Lancaster on the other, and which, uniting at Wirks- 



60 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

worth, sweep on to the Bristol Channel in the diagonal line of 
the English formations. These level plains represent the 
yielding, semi-coherent New Red Sandstone of England. 
The denuding agents have worn it down in the way we find 
the soft shale-beds worn down on the sea-shore. On the west 
we see it flanked by the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian 
systems of Wales and western England, — formations solid 
enough to form a hilly country ; and on the east, by a long 
hilly line, that, with little interruption, traverses the island 
diagonally from Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, to Lyme 
Regis on the English Channel. This elevated line traverses 
longitudinally the Oolitic formation, and owes its existence to 
those coralline reefs and firm calcareous sandstones of the 
system that are so extensively used by the architect. Another 
series of hilly ridges, somewhat more complicated in their 
windings, represent the Upper and Lower Chalk ; while the 
softer Weald, Gault, Greensand, and Tertiary deposits, we find 
existing as level plains or wide shallow valleys. In most of 
our geologic maps the hill-ranges are not indicated ; but in a 
country such as England, where these are so palpably a joint 
result of the geologic formations and the denuding agencies, the 
omission is surely a defect. 

Manchester I found as true a representative of the great 
manufacturing town of modern England, as York of the old 
English ecclesiastical city. One receives one's first intimation 
of its existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that 
overhangs it. There is a murky blot in one section of the sky, 
however clear the weather, which broadens and heightens as 
we approach, until at length it seems spread over half the firma- 
ment. And now the innumerable chimneys come in view, tall 
and dim in the dun haze, each bearing atop its own troubled 
pennon of darkness. And now we enter the suburbs, and pass 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 61 

through mediocre streets of brick, that seem as if they had 
been built wholesale by contract within the last half-dozen 
years. These humble houses are the homes* of the operative 
manufacturers. The old walls of York, built in the reign of 
Edward the First, still enclose the city; — the antique suit of 
armor made for it six hundred years ago, though the fit be 
somewhat of the tightest, buckles round it still. Manchester, 
on the other hand, has been doubling its population every half- 
century for the last hundred and fifty years ; and the cord of 
cotton twist that would have girdled it at the beginning of the 
great revolutionary war, would do little more than half-girdle 
it now. The field of Peterloo, on which the yeomanry slashed 
down the cotton-workers assembled to hear Henry Hunt, — 
poor lank-jawed men, who would doubtless have manifested 
less interest in the nonsense of the orator, had they been less 
hungry at the time, — has been covered with brick for the last 
ten years. 

As we advance, the town presents a new feature. We see 
whole streets of warehouses, — dead, dingy, gigantic buildings, 
barred out from the light ; and, save where here and there a 
huge wagon stands, lading or unlading under the mid-air 
crane, the thoroughfares, and especially the numerous cul de 
sacs, have a solitary, half-deserted air. But the city clocks 
have just struck one, — the dinner hour of the laboring Eng- 
lish ; and in one brief minute two-thirds of the population 
of the place have turned out into the streets. The rush of the 
human tide is tremendous, — headlong and arrowy as that of a 
Highland river in flood, or as that of a water-spout just broken 
amid the hills, and at once hurrying adowna hundred different 
ravines. But the outburst is short as fierce : we have stepped 
aside into some door-way, or out towards the centre of some 
public square, to be beyond the wind of such commotion ; and 
6 



62 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

in a few minutes all is over, and the streets even more quiet 
and solitary than before. There is an air of much magnifi- 
cence about the public buildings devoted to trade ; and the 
larger shops wear the solid aspect of long-established busi- 
ness. But nothing seems more characteristic of the great 
manufacturing city, though disagreeably so, than the river 
Irwell, which runs through the place, dividing it into a lesser 
and larger town, that, though they bear different names, are 
essentially one. The hapless river — a pretty enough stream 
a few miles higher up, with trees overhanging its banks, and 
fringes of green sedge set thick along its edges — loses caste 
as it gets among the mills and the print-works. There are 
myriads of dirty things given it to wash, and whole wagon- 
loads of poisons from dye-houses and bleach-yards thrown into 
it to carry away ; steam-boilers discharge into it their seething 
contents, and drains and sewers their fetid impurities ; till at 
length it rolls on, — here between tall dingy walls, there under 
precipices of red sandstone, — considerably less a river than a 
flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal 
or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except 
perhaps the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud 
volcano. In passing along where the river sweeps by the old 
Collegiate Church, I met a party of town-police dragging a 
female culprit — delirious, dirty, and in drink — to the police- 
office ; and I bethought me of the well-known comparison of 
Cowper, beginning, 

" Sweet stream, that -winds through yonder glade, 
Apt emblem of a virtuous maid," — 

of the maudlin woman not virtuous, — and of the Irwell. Ac- 
cording to one of the poets contemporary with him of Olney, 
slightly altered, 



ENGLAND AN ) TS PEOPLE. 63 

" In spite of fair Zelinda's charms, 
And all her bards express, 
Poor Lyce made as true a stream, 
And I but nattered less." 

1 spent in Manchester my first English Sabbath ; and as I 
had crossed the border, not to see countrymen, nor to hear 
such sermons as I might hear every Sunday at home, I went 
direct to the Collegiate Church. This building — a fine 
specimen of the florid Gothic — dates somewhere about the 
time when the Council of Constance was deposing Pope John 
for his enormous crimes, and burning John Huss and Jerome 
of Prague for their wholesome opinions; and when, though 
Popery had become miserably worn out as a code of belief, the 
revived religion of the New Testament could find no rest for 
the sole of its foot amid a wide weltering flood of practical 
infidelity and epicurism in the Church, and gross superstition 
and ignorance among the laity. And the architecture and 
numerous sculptures of the pile bear meet testimony to the 
character of the time. They approve themselves the produc- 
tions of an age in which the priest, engaged in his round of 
rite and ceremony, could intimate knowingly to a brother 
priest, without over-much exciting lay suspicion, that he knew 
his profession to be but a joke. Some of the old Cartularies 
curiously indicate this state of matters. " The Cartulary of 
Moray," says an ingenious writer in the North British Review, 
" contains the Constitutiones Lyncolnienses, inserted as proper 
rules for the priests of that northern province, from which we 
learn that they were to enter the place of worship, nut with 
insolent looks, but decently and in order ; and were to 6e 
guilty of no laughing, or of attempting the perpetration of any 
base jokes (turpi risu aut jocu), and at the same time to con- 
duct their whisperings in an under tone. A full stomp ch, 



64 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

however, is not tie best provocative to lively attention; and it 
is therefore far from wonderful that the fathers dozed. In- 
genuity provided a remedy even for this; and the curious 
visiter will find in the niches of the ruined walls of the ecclesi- 
astical edifices of other days oscillating seats, which turn upon 
a pivot, and require the utmost care of the sitter to keep steady. 
The poor monk who would dare to indulge in one short nap 
would by this most cruel contrivance be thrown forward upon 
the stone-floor of the edifice, to the great danger of his neck, 
and be covered at the same time with the ■ base laughter and 
joking ' of his brethren." 

Externally the Collegiate Church is sorely wasted and much 
thickened; and, save at some little distance, its light and 
elegant proportions fail to tell. The sooty atmosphere of the 
place has imparted to it its own dingy hue ; while the soft 
New Red Sandstone of which it is built has resigned all the 
nicer tracery intrusted to its keeping to the slow wear of the 
four centuries which have elapsed since the erection of the 
edifice. But in the interior all is fresh and sharp as when the 
field of Bosworth was stricken. What first impresses as un- 
usual is the blaze of light which fills the place. For the 
expected dim solemnity of an old ecclesiastical edifice, one 
finds the full glare of a modern assembly-room ; the day-light 
streams in through numerous windows, mullioned with slim 
shafts of stone curiously intertwisted atop, and plays amid tall 
slender columns, arches of graceful sweep, and singularly ele- 
gant groinings, that shoot out their clusters of stony branches, 
light and graceful as the expanding boughs of some lime or 
poplar grove. The air of the place is gay, not solemn ; nor 
are the subjects of its numerous sculptures of a kind suited to 
deepen the impression. Not a few of the carvings which dec- 
orate every patch of vail are of the most ludicrous character. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 65 

Kows Df grotesque head, look down into the nave from the 
spandrels : some twist their features to the one side of the face, 
some to the other; some wink hard, as if exceedingly in joke ; 
some troll out their tongue ; some give expression to a lugu- 
brious mirth, others to a ludicrous sorrow. In the choir, — 
)f course, a still holier part of the edifice than the nave, — the 
sculptor seems to have let his imagination altogether run riot. 
In one compartment there sits, with a birch over his shoulder, 
an old fox, stern of aspect as Goldsmith's schoolmaster, 
engaged in teaching two cubs to read. In another, a respect- 
able-looking boar, elevated on his hind legs, is playing on the 
bag-pipe, while his hopeful family, four young pigs, are danc- 
ing to his music behind their trough. In yet another, there is 
a hare, contemplating with evident satisfaction a boiling pot, 
which contains a dog in a fair way of becoming tender. But 
in yet another the priestly designer seems to have lost sight of 
prudence and decorum altogether : the chief figure in the piece 
is a monkey administering extreme unction to a dying man, 
while a party of other monkeys are plundering the poor sufferer 
of his effects, and gobbling up his provisions. A Scotch High- 
lander's faith in the fairies is much less a reality now than it 
has been ; but few Scotch Highlanders would venture to take 
such liberties with their neighbors the " good people," a* the 
old ecclesiastics of Manchester took with the services of thbir 
religion. 

It is rather difficult for a stranger in such a place to follow 
with strict attention the lesson of the day. To the sermon, 
however, which was preached in a surplice, I found it com- 
paratively easy to listen. The Sabbath — a red-letter one — 
was the twice famous St. Bartholomew's day, associated in the 
history of Protestantism with the barbarous massacre of the 
French Huguenots, and in the history of Puritanism with the 
6* 



66 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ejection of the English non-conforming ministers after the 
Restoration ; and the sermon was a labored defence of saints' 
days in general, and of the claims of St. Bartholomew's day in 
particular. There was not a very great deal known of St. 
Bartholomew, said the clergyman ; but this much at least we 
all know, — he was a good man, — an exceedingly good man : 
it would be well for us to be all like him ; and it was evidently 
our duty to be trying to be as like him as we could. As for 
saints' days, there could be no doubt about them : they were 
very admirable things ; they had large standing in tradition, 
as might be seen from ecclesiastical history, and the writings 
of the later fathers ; and large standing, too, in the Church of 
England, — a fact which no one acquainted with "our excel- 
lent Prayer-Book " could in the least question ; nay, it would 
seem as if they had even some standing in Scripture itself. 
Did not St. Paul remind Timothy of the faith that had dwelt 
in Lois and Eunice, his grandmother and mother ? and had 
we not therefore a good Scriptural argument for keeping 
saints' days, seeing that Timothy must have respected the 
saint his grandmother ? I looked round me to see how the 
congregation was taking all this, but the congregation bore the 
tranquil air of people quite used to such sermons. There 
were a good many elderly gentlemen who had dropped asleep, 
and a good many more who seemed speculating in cotton ; but 
the general aspect was one of heavy, inattentive decency : 
there was, in short, no class of countenances within the build- 
ing that bore the appropriate expression, save the stone counte- 
nances on the wall. 

My fellow-guests in the coffee-house in which I lodged were, 
an English Independent, a man of some intelligence, — and a 
young Scotchman, a member of the Relief body. They had 
been hearing they told me, an excellent discourse, in which 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 67 

the preacher had made impressive allusion to the historic 
associations of the day ; in especial, to the time 

" When good Coligny's hoary hair was dabbled all in blood." 

I greatly tickled them, by giviig them, in turn, a simple out- 
line, without note or comment, of the sermon I had been hear- 
ing. The clergyman from whom it emanated, maugre his use 
of the surplice in the pulpit, and his zeal for saints' days, was, 
I was informed, not properly a Puseyite, but rather one of the 
class of stiff High Churchmen, that germinate into Puseyites 
when their creed becomes vital within them. For the thorough 
High Churchman bears, it would appear, the same sort of re- 
semblance to the energetic Puseyite, that a dried bulb in the 
florist's drawer does to a bulb of the same species in his flower- 
garden, when swollen with the vegetative juices, and rich in 
leaf and flower. It is not always the most important matters 
that take the strongest hold of the mind. The sermon and the 
ludicrous carvings, linked as closely together, by a trick of the 
associative faculty, as Cruikshank's designs in Oliver Twist 
with the letter-press of Dickens, continued to haunt me through- 
out the evening. 

I lodged within a stone-cast of the terminus of the Great 
Manchester and Birmingham Railway. I could hear the roar- 
ing of the trains along the line, from morning till near mid- 
day, and during the whole afternoon ; and, just as the evening 
was setting in, I sauntered down to the gate by which a return 
train was discharging its hundreds of passengers, fresh from 
the Sabbath amusements of the country, that I might see how 
they looked. There did not seem much of enjoyment about 
the wearied and somewhat draggled groups : they wore, on 
the contrary, rather an unhappy physiognomy, as if they had 
missed spending the day quite to their minds, and were now 



68 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

returning sad and disappointed, to the round of toil, from 
which it ought to have proved a sweet interval of relief. A 
congregation just dismissed from hearing a vigorous evening 
discourse would have borne, to a certainty, a more cheerful 
air. There was not much actual drunkenness among the 
crowd, — thanks to the preference which the Englishman gives 
to his ale over ardent spirits, — not a tithe of what I would 
have witnessed, on a similar occasion, in my own country. A 
few there were, however, evidently muddled ; and I saw one 
positive scene. A young man considerably in liquor had quar- 
relled with his mistress, and, threatening to throw himself into 
the Irwell, off he had bolted in the direction of the river. 
There was a shriek of agony from the young woman, and a cry 
of " stop him, stop him," to which a tall, bulky Englishman, 
of the true John Bull type, had coolly responded, by thrusting 
forth his foot as he passed, and tripping him at full length on 
the pavement; and for a few minutes all was hubbub and 
onfusion. With, however, this exception, the aspect of the 
numerous passengers had a sort of animal decency about it, 
which one might in vain look for among the Sunday travellers 
on a Scotch railway. Sunday seems greatly less connected 
with the fourth commandment in the humble English miiK* 
than in that of Scotland, and so a less disreputable portion of 
the people go abroad. There is a considerable difference, too, 
between masses of men simply ignorant of religion, and masses 
of men broken loose from it; and the Sabbath-contemning 
Scotch belong to the latter category. With the humble Eng- 
lishman trained up to no regular habit of church-going, Sab- 
bath is pudding-day, and clean-shirt-day, and a day for lolling 
on the grass opposite the sun, and, if there be a river or canal 
bard by. for trying how the gudgeons bite, or, if in the neigh- 
borhood of a railway, for taking a short trip to some country 



ENGLAM') AND ITS PEOPLE. 69 

inn, famous fcr its cakes and ale; but to the humble Scot 
become English in his Sabbath views, the day is, in most 
cases, a time of sheer recklessness and dissipation. There is 
much truth in the shrewd remark of Sir Walter Scott, that 
the Scotch, once metamorphosed into Englishmen, make very 
mischievous Englishmen indeed. 

Among the existing varieties of the genus philanthropist, — 
benevolent men bent on bettering the condition of the masses, 
— there is a variety who would fain send out our working peo- 
ple to the country on Sabbaths, to become happy and innocent 
in smelling primroses, and stringing daisies on grass stalks. 
An excellent scheme theirs, if they but knew it, for sinking a 
people into ignorance and brutality, — for filling a country with 
gloomy workhouses, and the workhouses with unhappy paupers. 
'Tis pity rather that the institution of the Sabbath, in its 
economic bearings, should not be better understood by the utili- 
tarian. The problem which it furnishes is not particularly dif- 
ficult, if one could be but made to understand, as a first step in 
the process, that it is really worth solving. The mere animal, 
that has to pass six days of the week in hard labor, benefits 
greatly by a seventh day of mere animal rest and enjoyment : 
the repose according to its nature proves of signal use to it, just 
because it is repose according to its nature. But man is not a 
mere animal : what is best for the ox and the ass is not best 
for him ; and in order to degrade him into a poor unintellect- 
ual slave, over whom tyranny, in its caprice, may trample 
rough-shod, it is brit necessary to tie him down, animai-like, 
during his six working days, to hard, engrossing labor, and to 
convert the seventh into a day of frivolous, unthinking relaxa- 
tion. Hhtory speaks with much emphasis on the point. The 
old despotic Stuarts were tolerable adepts in the art of king- 
craft, and Vnew weL ,vhat they were doing when they backed 



70 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

with their authority the Book of Sports. The merry, unthink- 
ing serfs, who, early in the reign of Charles the First, danced 
on Sabbaths round the Maypole, were afterwards the ready 
tools of despotism, and fought that England might be enslaved. 
The Ironsides, who, in the cause of civil and religious freedom, 
bore them down, were staunch Sabbatarians. 

In no history, however, is the value of the Sabbath more 
strikingly illustrated than in that of the Scotch people during 
the seventeenth and the larger portion of the eighteenth cen- 
turies. Religion and the Sabbath were their sole instructors, 
and this in times so little favorable to the cultivation of mind, 
so darkened by persecution and stained with blood, that, in at 
least the earlier of these centuries, we derive our knowledge 
of the character and amount of the popular intelligence mainly 
from the death-testimonies of our humbler martyrs, here and 
there corroborated by the incidental evidence of writers such 
as Burnet.^ In these noble addresses from prison and scaffold, 
— the composition of men drafted by oppression almost at ran- 
dom from out the general mass, — we see how vigorously our 
Presbyterian people had learned to think, and how well to give 
their thinking expression. In the quieter times which followed 
the Revolution, the Scottish peasantry existed as at once the 
most provident and intellectual in Europe ; and a moral and 

* Burnet, afterwards the celebrated Whig Bishop, was one of six divines 
sent out by Archbishop Leighton, in 1670, to argue the Scotch people 
into Episcopacy. But the mission was by no means successful. " The 
people of the country," says Burnet, " came generally to hear us, though 
not in great crowds. "We were indeed amazed to see a poor commonalty 
so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be 
set to the power of princes in matters of religion. Upon all these topics 
they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers 
to anything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was* 
spread even among the meanest of them, — their cottagers and their ser 
rants." (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 431.) 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 71 

instructed people pressed outwards beyond the i arrow bounds 
of their country, and rose into offices of trust and importance 
in all the nations of the world. There were no Societies for 
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in those days. But the 
Sabbath was kept holy : it was a day from which every dissi- 
pating frivolity was excluded by a stern sense of duty. The 
popular mind, with weight imparted to it by its religious 
earnestness, and direction by the pulpit addresses of the day, 
expatiated on matters of grave import, of which the tendency 
was to concentrate and strengthen, not scatter and weaken, the 
faculties ; and the secular cogitations of the week came to bear, 
in consequence, a Sabbath-day stamp of depth and solidity. 
The one day in the seven struck the tone for the other six. Our 
modern apostles of popular instruction rear up no such men 
among the masses as were developed under the Sabbatarian 
system in Scotland. Their aptest pupils prove but the loqua- 
cious gabbers of their respective workshops, — shallow super- 
ficialists, that bear on the surface of their minds a thin diffusion 
of ill-remembered facts and crude theories ; and rarely indeed 
do we see them rising in the scale of society : they become 
Socialists by hundreds, and Chartists by thousands, and get 
no higher. The disseminator of mere useful knowledge takes 
aim at the popular ignorance ; but his inept and unscientific 
gunnery does not include in its calculations the parabolic curve 
of man's spiritual nature ; and so, aiming direct at the mark- 
he aims too low, and the charge falls short. 



72 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER IV. 

Quit Manchester for Wolverhampton. — Scenery of the New Red Sand 
stone ; apparent Repetition of Pattern. — The frequent Marshes of Eng- 
land ; curiously represented in the National Literature ; Influence on 
the National Superstitions. — Wolverhampton. — Peculiar Aspect of the 
Dudley Coal-field ; striking Passage in its History. — The Rise of Bir- 
mingham into a great Manufacturing Town an Effect of the Develop- 
ment of its Mineral Treasures. — Upper Ludlow Deposit; Aymestry 
Limestone ; both Deposits of peculiar Interest to the Scotch Geologist. 
— The Lingula Lewisii and Terebratula Wilsoni. — General Resem- 
blance of the Silurian Fossils to those of the Mountain Limestone. — 
First-born of the Vertebrata yet known. — Order of Creation. — The 
Wren's Nest. — Fossils of the Wenlock Limestone ; in a State of beauti- 
ful Keeping. — Anecdote. — Asaphus Caudatus ; common, it would seem, 
to both the Silurian and Carboniferous Rocks. — Limestone Miners. — 
Noble Gallery excavated in the Hill. 

I quitted Manchester by the morning train, and travelled 
through a flat New Red Sandstone district, on the Birming- 
ham Railway, for about eighty miles. One finds quite the sort 
of country here for travelling over by steam. If one misses 
seeing a bit of landscape, as the carriages hurry through, and 
the objects in the foreground look dim and indistinct, and all in 
motion, as if seen through water, it is sure to be repeated in 
the course of a few miles, and again and again repeated. I 
was reminded, as we hurried along, and the fiat country opened 
and spread out on either side, of webs of carpet stuff nailed 
down to pieces of boarding, and presenting, at regular distances, 
returns of the same rich pattern. Red detached houses stand 
up amid the green fields ; little bits of brick villages lie grouped 
beside cross roads; irregular patches of wood occupy nooks 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 73 

and corners ; lines of poplars rise tall and taper amid strag- 
gling cottages ; and then, having once passed houses, villages, 
and woods, we seem as if we had to pass them again and 
again ; the red detached houses return, the bits of villages, 
the woody nooks and corners, the lines of taper poplars amid 
the cottages ; and thus the repetitions of the pattern run on 
and on. 

In a country so level as England there must be many a. 
swampy hollow furnished with no outlet to its waters. The 
bogs and marshes of the midland and southern counties formed 
of old the natural strongholds, in which the people, in times of 
extremity, sheltered from the invader. Alfred's main refuge, 
when all others failed him, was a bog of Somersetshire. When 
passing this morning along frequent fields of osiers and wide- 
spread marshes, bristling with thickets of bulrushes and reeds, 
I was led to think of what had never before occurred to me, — 
the considerable amount of imagery and description which the 
poets of England have transferred from scenery of this charac- 
ter into the national literature. There is in English verse 
much whispering of osiers beside silent streams, and much 
waving of sedges over quiet waters. Shakspeare has his ex- 
quisite pictures of slow-gliding currents, 

" Making sweet music with the enamelled stones, 
And giving gentle kisses to each sedge 
They overtake in their lone pilgrimage." 

And Milton, too, of water-nymphs 

" Sitting by rushy fringed bank, 
Where grows the willow and the osier dant ; 

" Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave. 
In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
The loose train of their amber-dropping hair ; 



M FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

or of " sighing sent," by the " parting genius, 

" From haunted spring and dale, 
Edged with poplar pale." 

"We find occasional glimpses of the same dank scenery in Col- 
lins, Cowper, and Crabbe ; and very frequent ones, in o ir own 
times, in the graphic descriptions of Alfred Tennyson and 
Thomas Hood. 

" One "willow o'er the river wept, 
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh ; 
Above in the wind sported the swallow, 
Chasing itself at its own wild will ; 
And far through the marish green, and still, 

The tangled water-courses slept, 
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow." 

Not less striking is at least one of the pictures drawn oy 
Hood : — 

" The coot was swimming in the reedy pool, 
Beside the water-hen, so soon affrighted ; 
And in the weedy moat, the heron, fond 
Of solitude, alighted ; 
The moping heron, motionless and stiff, 
That on a stone as silently and stilly 
Stood, an apparent sentinel, as if 
To guard the water-lily." 

The watery flats of the country have had also their influ- 
ence on the popular superstitions. The delusive tapers that 
spring up a-nights from stagnant bogs and fens must have been 
of frequent appearance in the more marshy districts of Eng- 
land ; and we accordingly find, that of all the national goblins 
the goblin of the wandering night-fire, whether recognized as 
Jack-of-the-Lantern or Will-of-the-Wisp, was one of the best 
known. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 75 

" She was pinched and pulled, she said, 
And he by friar's lantern led.'* 

Or, as the exquisite poet who produced this couplet more elab- 
orately describes the apparition in his " Paradise Lost," 

" A wandering fire, 
Compact of unctuous vapor, which the night 
Kindles through agitation to a flame, 
Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, 
Hovering and blazing with delusive light, 
Leading the amazed night-wanderer from his way 
Through bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool, 
There swallowed up and lost, from succor far." 

Scarce inferior to even the description of Milton is that of 
Collins : — 

" Ah, homely swains ! your homeward steps ne'er lose ; 

Let not dank Will mislead you on the heath : 
Dancing in mirky night, o'er fen and lake, 

He glows, to draw you downward to your death, 
In his bewitched, low, marshy willow-brake. 

What though, far off from some dark dell espied, 
His glimmering mazes cheer the excursive sight ? 

Yet turn, ye wanderers, turn your steps aside, 
Nor trust the guidance of that faithless light ; 

For watchful, lurking, 'mid the unrustling reed, 
At these mirk hours, the wily monster lies, 

And listens oft to hear the passing steed, 
And frequent round him rolls his sullen eyes, 
If chance his savage wrath may some weak wretch surprise." 

One soon wearies of the monotony of railway travelling, — 
of hurrying through a country, stage after stage, without inci- 
dent or advantage ; and so I felt quite glad enough, when the 
train stopped at Wolverhampton, to find myself once 1 lore at 
freedom and afoot. There will be an end, surely, to all works 
of travels, when the railway system of the world shall be com- 



76 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

pleted. I passed direct through Wolverhampton, —a laige but 
rather uninteresting assemblage of red-brick houses, copped 
with red-tile roofs, slippered with red-tile floors, and neither 
in its component parts nor in its grouping differing in any per- 
ceptible degree from several scores of the other assemblages of 
red-brick houses that form the busier market-towns of Eng- 
land. The town has been built in the neighborhood of the 
Dudley coal-basin, on an incoherent lower deposit of New Red 
Sandstone, unfitted for the purposes of the stone-mason, but 
peculiarly well suited, in some of its superficial argillaceous 
beds, for those of the brick-maker. Hence the prevailing color 
and character of the place ; and such, in kind, are the circum- 
stances that impart to the great majority of English towns so 
very different an aspect from that borne by our Scottish ones. 
They are the towns of a brick and tile manufacturing country, 
rich in coal and clay, but singularly poor in sandstone quar- 
ries. 

I took the Dudley road, and left the scattered suburbs of the 
town but a few hundred yards behind me, when the altered 
appearance of the country gave evidence that I had quitted the 
New Red Sandstone, and had entered on the Coal Measures. 
On the right, scarce a gun-shot from the way-side, there 
stretched away a rich though comparatively thinly-inhabited 
country, — green, undulated, lined thickly, lengthwise and 
athwart, with luxuriant hedge-rows, sparsely sprinkled with 
farm-houses, and over-canopied this morning by a clear blue 
sky; while on the left, far as the eye could penetrate through 
a mud-colored atmosphere of smoke and culm, there spread 
out a barren uneven wilderness of slag and shale, the debris 
of lime-kilns and smelting works, and of coal and ironstone 
pits ; and amid the dun haze there stood up what seemed a 
c^n'jnuois city of fire-belching furnaces and smoke-vomiting 



ENGLAND AND ITS PE01 LE. 77 

chimneys, blent with numerous groups of little dingy build- 
ings, the dwellings of iron-smelters and miners. Wherever 
the New Red Sandstone extends, the country wears a sleek 
unbroken skin of green ; wherever the Coal Measures spread 
away, lake-like, from the lower edges of this formation, all is 
verdureless, broken, and gray. The coloring of the two form- 
ttions could be scarcely better defined in a geological map 
than here on the face of the landscape. There is no such 
utter ruin of the surface in our mining districts in Scotland. 
The rubbish of the subterranean workings is scarce at all 
suffered to encroach, save in widely-scattered hillocks, on the 
arable superficies ; and these hillocks the indefatigable agricul- 
turist is ever levelling and carrying away, to make way for the 
plough ; whereas, so entirely has the farmer been beaten from 
off the field here, and so thickly do the heaps cumber the sur- 
face, that one might almost imagine the land had been seized 
in the remote past by some mortal sickness, and, after vomit- 
ing out its bowels, had lain stone-dead ever since. The labor- 
ing inhabitants of this desert — a rude, improvident, Cyclopean 
race, indifferent to all save the mineral treasures of the soil — 
are rather graphically designated in the neighboring districts, 
where I found them exceedingly cheaply rated, as "the lie- 
wasters." Some six or eight centuries ago, the Dudley coal- 
field existed as a wild forest, in which a few semi-barbarous 
iron-smelters and charcoal-burners carried on their solitary 
labors ; and which was remarkable chiefly for a seam of coal 
thirty feet in thickness, which, like some of the coal-seams of 
the United States, cropped out at the surface, and was wrought 
among the trees in the open air. A small colony of workers in 
iron of various kinds settled in the neighborhood, and their 
congregated forges and cottage-dwellings formed a little noisy 
hamlet amid the woodlands. The miner explored, to greater 



78 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and stiL greater depths, the mineral treasures of the coal-field , 
the ever-resounding, ever-smoking village added house to house 
and forge to forge, as the fuel and the ironstone heaps accumu- 
lated ; till at length the three thick bands of dark ore, and the 
ten-yard coal-seam of the basin, though restricted to a space 
greatly less in area than some of our Scottish lakes, produced, 
out of the few congregated huts, the busy town of Birming- 
ham, with its two hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. 
And as the rise of the place has been connected with the devel- 
opment of the mineral treasures of its small but exceedingly 
rich coal-field, their exhaustion, unless there open up to it 
new fields of industry, must induce its decline. There is a 
day coming, though a still distant one, when the miner shall 
have done with this wilderness of debris and chimneys, just 
as the charcoal-burner had done with it when the woodlands 
were exhausted ages ago, or as the farmer had done with it at 
a considerably later period ; and when it shall exist as an unin- 
habited desert, full of gloomy pitfalls, half-hidden by a stunted 
vegetation, and studded with unseemly ruins of brick ; and the 
neighboring city, like a beggared spendthrift, that, after having 
run through his patrimony, continues to reside in the house of 
his ancestors, shall have, in all probability, to shut up many an 
apartment, and leave many a forsaken range of offices and out- 
houses to sink into decay. 

The road began to ascend from the low platform of the coal- 
field, along the shoulder of a green hill that rises some six or 
seven hundred feet over the level of the sea, — no inconsider- 
able elevation in this part of the kingdom. There were no 
longer heaps of dark-colored debris on either hand ; and I saw 
for the first time in England, where there had been a cutting 
into the acclivity, to lower the angle of the ascent, a section of 
rock much resembling our Scotch grauwacke of the southern 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 79 

counties. Unlike our Scotch grauwacke, however, I found 
that almost every fragment of the mass contained its fossil, 
— some ill-preserved terebratula or leptcena, or some sorely 
weathered coralline : but all was doubtful and obscure ; and I 
looked round me, though in vain, for some band of lime com- 
pact enough to exhibit in its sharp-edged casts the character- 
istic peculiarities of the group. A spruce wagoner, in a blue 
frock much roughened with needle-work, came whistling down 
the hill beside his team, and I inquired of him whether there 
were limestone quarries in the neighborhood. " Yez, yez, lots 
of lime just afore thee," said the wagoner; "can't miss th/* 
way, if thou lookest to the hill-side." I went on for a few 
hundred yards, and found an extensive quarry existing as a 
somewhat dreary-looking dell, deeply scooped out of the accliv- 
ity on the left, with heaps of broken grass-grown debris on the 
one side of the excavation, and on the other a precipitous front 
of gray lichened rock, against which there leaned a line of open 
kilns and a ruinous hut. 

The quarriers were engaged in playing mattock and lever on 
an open front in the upper part of the dell, which, both from 
its deserted appearance and the magnitude of its weather- 
stained workings, appeared to be much less extensively w T rought 
than at some former period. I felt a peculiar interest in ex- 
amining the numerous fossils of the deposit, — such an interest 
as that experienced by the over-curious Calender in the Ara- 
bian Nights, when first introduced into the hall of the winded 
horse, from which, though free to roam over all the rest of the 
palace, with its hundred gates and its golden doors, he had 
been long sedulously excluded. I had now entered, for the 
first time, into a chamber of the grand fossiliferous museum, — 
the great stone-record edifice of our island, ■ — of which I had 
not th.j -ight the less frequently from the circumstance that I 



80 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

was better acquainted with the chamber that lies directly over 
head, if I may so speak, with but a thin floor between, than 
with any other in the erection. I had been laboring for years 
in the Lower Old Ked Sandstone, and had acquainted myself 
with its winged and plate-covered, its enamelled and tubercle- 
roughened ichthyolites ; but there is no getting down in Scot- 
land into the cellarage of the edifice : it is as thoroughly a 
mystery to the mere Scotch geologist as the cellarage of 
Todgers' in Martin Chuzzlewit, of which a stranger kept the 
key, was to the inmates of that respectable tavern. Here, how- 
ever, I had got fairly into the cellar at last. The frontage of 
fossiliferous grauwacke-looking rock, by the way-side, which I 
had just examined, is known, thanks to Sir Roderick Murchi- 
son, to belong to the Upper Ludlow deposit, — the Silurian 
base on which the Old Red Sandstone rests ; and I had now 
got a story further down, and was among the Aymestry Lime- 
stones. 

The first fossil I picked up greatly resembled in size and 
form a pistol-bullet. It proved to be one of the most charac- 
teristic shells of the formation, — the Terebratula Wilsoni. 
Nor was the second I found — the Lingida Lewisii, a bivalve 
formed like the blade of a wooden shovel — less characteristic. 
The Lingula still exists in some two or three species in the 
distant Moluccas. There was but one of these known in the 
times of Cuvier, the Lingula anatina ; and so unlike was it 
deemed by the naturalist to any of its contemporary mollusca 
that of the single species he formed not only a distinct genus, 
but also an independent class. The existing, like the fossil 
shell, resembles the blade of a wooden shovel ; but the shovel 
has also a handle, and in this mainly consists its dissimilarity 
to any other bivalve : a cylindrical cartilaginous stem or foot- 
stalk elevates it some three or four inches over the rocky base 



LNGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 81 

to which it is .ttached, just as the handle of a shovel, stuck 
half a foot intD the earth, at the part where the hand grasps it, 
would elevate the blade over the surface, or as the stem of a 
tulip elevates the flower over the soil. A community of Lin- 
gulse must resemble, in their deep-sea haunts, a group of Lilli- 
putian shovels, reversed by the laborers to indicate their work 
completed, or a bed of half-folded tulips, raised on stiff, dingy 
stems, and exhibiting flattened petals of delicate green. I am 
not aware that any trace of the cartilaginous foot-stalk has 
been yet detected in fossil Lingulse ; — like those of this quarry, 
they are mere shovel-blades divested of the handles : but in all 
that survives of them, or could be expected to survive, — the 
calcareous portion, — they are identical in type with the living 
mollusc of the Moluccas. What most strikes in the globe- 
shaped terebratula, their contemporary, is the singularly an- 
tique character of the ventral margin : it seems moulded in 
the extreme of an ancient fashion, long since gone out. In- 
stead of running continuously round in one plane, like the 
margins of our existing cockle, venus, or mactra, so as to form, 
when the valves are shut, a rectilinear line of division, it pre- 
sents in the centre a huge dovetail, so that the lower valve 
exhibits in its middle front a square gateway, which we see 
occupied, when the mouth is closed, by a portcullis-like pro- 
jection, dependent from the margin of the upper valve. Mar- 
gins of this antique form characterize some of the terebratulce 
of even the Chalk, and the spirifers of the Carboniferous Lime- 
stone ; but in none of the comparatively modern shells is the 
square portcullis-shaped indentation so strongly indicated as in 
the Terebratula Wilsoni. I picked up several other fossils in 
the quarry: the Orthis orbicularis and Orthis lunata ; the 
Atri/pa affinis ; several ill-preserved portions of orthoceratite, 
belmging chiefly, so far as their state of keeping enabled me 



82 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

to decide, to the Orthoceras bullatum; a small, imperfectly- 
conical coral, that more resembled the Stromatopora comentrica 
of the Wenlock rocks, than any of the other Silurian corals 
figured by Murchison ; and a few minute sprigs of the Favosites 
polymorpha. The concretionary character of the limestone of 
the deposit has militated against the preservation of the larger 
organisms which it encloses. Of the smaller shells, many are 
in a beautiful state of keeping : like some of the comparatively 
modern shells of the Oolite, they still retain unaltered the sil- 
very lustre of the nacre, and present outlines as sharp and well 
defined, with every delicate angle unworn, and every minute 
stria undefaced, as if inhabited but yesterday by the living 
molluscs ; whereas most of the bulkier fossils, from the broken 
and detached nature of the rock, — a nodular limestone em- 
bedded in strata of shale, — exist as mere fragments. What 
perhaps first strikes the eye is the deep-sea character of the 
deposit, and its general resemblance to the Mountain Lime- 
stone. Nature, though she dropped between the times of the 
Silurian and Carboniferous oceans many of her genera, and, 
with but a few marked exceptions, all her species,^ seems to 
have scarce at all altered the general types after which the 
productions of both oceans were moulded. 

I could find in this quarry of the Aymestry Limestone no 
trace of aught higher than the Cephalopoda, — none of those 
plates, scales, spines, or teeth, indicative of the vertebrate ani- 
mals, which so abound in the Lower Old Red Sandstones of 
Scotland. And yet the vertebrata seem to have existed at the 

* " Upwards of eigiit hundred extinct species of animals have been 
described as belonging to the earliest or Protozoic and Silurian period ; 
and of these, only about one hundred are found also in the overlying 
Devonian series ; while but fifteen are common to the whole Palseozoio 
period, and not one extends beyond it.'' (Ansted, 1844.) 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 83 

time. The famous bone-bed of the IJpper Silurian system, 
with its well-marked ichthyolitic remains, occurs in the Upper 
Ludlow Rock, — the deposit immediately over head. We find 
it shelved high, if I may so speak, in the first story of the sys» 
tern, reckoning from the roof downwards ; the calcareous de- 
posit in which this hill-side quarry has been hodowed forms a 
second story ; the Lower Ludlow Rock a third ; and in yet a 
fourth, the Wenlock Limestone : just one remove over the 
Lower Silurians, — for the Wenlock Shale constitutes the base 
story of the upper division, — there have been found the re- 
mains of a fish, or rather minute portions of the remains of a 
fish, the most ancient yet known to the geologist. " Take the 
Lower Silurians all over the globe," says Sir Roderick Murchi- 
son, in a note to the writer of these chapters, which bears date 
no further back than last July, "and they have never yet 
offered the trace of a fish." It is to be regretted that the ich- 
thyolite of the Wenlock Limestone — the first-born of the ver- 
tebrata whose birth and death seem entered in the geologic 
register — has not been made the subject of a careful memoir, 
illustrated by a good engraving. One is naturally desirous to 
know all that can be known regarding the first entrance in the 
drama of existence of a new class in creation, and to have the 
place and date which the entry bears in the record fairly estab- 
lished. The evidence, however, though not yet made patent 
to the geological brotherhood, seems to le solid. It has at 
least satisfied a writer in the Edinburgh Revieiv of last year, 
generally recognized as one of the master-geologists of the age. 
" We have seen," says Mr. Sedgwick, the understood author 
of the article, " characteristic portions of a fish derived from the 
shales alternating with the Wenlock Limestone. This ichthy- 
olite, to speak in the technical language of Agassiz, undoubt- 
edly belongs to the Cestraciont family, of the Placoid order, — 



84 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

proving to demonstration that the oldest known fossil fish 
belongs to the highest type of that division of the vertebrata.' 
A strange debut this, and of deep interest, to the student of 
nature. The veil of mystery must forever rest over the act of 
creation ; but it is something to know of its order, — to know 
that, as exhibited in the great geologic register, graven, like 
the decalogue of old, on tables of stone, there is an analogy 
maintained, that indicates identity of style with the order speci- 
fied in the Mosaic record as that observed by the Creator in 
producing the scene of things to which we ourselves belong. 
In both records, — the sculptured and the written, — periods of 
creative energy are indicated as alternating with periods of 
rest, — days in which the Creator labored, with nights in 
which He ceased from his labors, again to resume them in the 
morning. According to both records, higher and lower exist- 
ences were called into being successively, not simultaneously ; 
— according to both, after each interval of repose, the succeed- 
ing period of activity witnessed loftier and yet loftier efforts of 
production; — according to both, though in the earlier stages 
there was incompleteness in the scale of existence, there was 
yet no imperfection in the individual existences of which the 
scale was composed ; — at the termination of the first, as of the 
last day of creation, all in its kind was good. Ere any of the 
higher natures existed, 

" God saw that all was good, 
When even and morn recorded the third day." 

I quitted the quarry in the hill-side, and walked on through 
the village of Sedgley, towards a second and much more strik- 
ing hill, well known to geologists and lovers of the picturesque 
as the " Wren's Nest." A third hill, that of Dudley, beautifully 
wooded and capped by its fine old castle, lies direct in the same 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 85 

line * so that the three hills taken together form a chain of 
eminences, which run diagonally, for some four or five miles, 
into the middle of the coal-basin ; and which, rising high from 
the surrounding level, resemble steep-sided islets in an Alpine 
lake. It is a somewhat curious circumstance, that while the 
enclosing shores of the basin are formed of the Lower New Red 
Sandstone, and the basin itself of the Upper and Lower Coal 
Measures, these three islets are all Silurian; the first, — that of 
Sedgley, — which I had just quitted, presenting in succession 
the Upper Ludlow Rock and Aymestry Limestone, with some 
of the inferior deposits on which these rest ; and the second 
and third the Wenlock Shale and Wenlock Limestone. The 
" Wren's Nest," as I approached it this day along green lanes 
and over quiet fields, fringed with trees, presented the appear- 
ance of some bold sea-promontory, crowned atop with stunted 
wood, and flanked by a tall, pale-gray precipice, continuous as a 
rampart for a full half-mile. But, to borrow from one of Byron's 
descriptions, 

" There is no sea to lave its base, 
But a most living landscape, and the wave 
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men 
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke 
Rising from rustic roofs." 

Such is the profile of the hill on both sides. Seen in front, it 
presents the appearance of a truncated dome ; while atop we 
find it occupied by an elliptical, crater-like hollow, that has 
been grooved deep, by the hand of Nature, along the flat sum- 
mit, so as to form a huge nest, into which the gigantic roc 
of eastern story might drop a hundred such eggs as the one 
familiar to the students of the great voyager Sinbad. And 
hence the name of the eminence. John Bull, making merry, 
in one of his humorous moods, with its imposing greatness, 
8 



86 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

has termed it the " WrerCs Nest." I came up to its gray lines 
of sloping precipice, and found them so thickly charged with 
their sepulchral tablets and pictorial epitaphs, that, like the 
walls of some Egyptian street of tombs, almost every square 
yard bears its own lengthened inscription. These sloping 
precipices, situated as they now are in central England, once 
formed a deep-sea bottom, far out of reach of land, whose 
green recesses were whitened by innumerable corals and coral- 
lines, amid which ancient shells, that loved the profounder 
depths, terebratula, leptsena, and spirifer, lay anchored ; while 
innumerable trilobites crept sluggishly above zoophyte and 
mollusc, on the thickly-inhabited platform ; and the orthoceras 
and the bellerophon floated along the surface high over head. 
A strange story, surely, but not more strange than true : in at 
least the leading details there is no possibility of mistaking the 
purport of the inscriptions. 

The outer front of precipice we find composed of carbonate 
of lime, alternating with thin layers of a fine-grained alumi- 
nous shale, which yields to the weather, betraying, in every 
more exposed portion of the rock, the organic character of the 
lime-stone. Wherever the impalpable shale has been washed 
away, we find the stone as sharply sculptured beneath as a 
Chinese snuff-box ; with this difference, however, that the fig- 
ures are more nicely relieved, and grouped much more thickly 
together. We ascertain that every component particle of the 
roughened ground on which they lie, even the most minute, is 
organic. It is composed of portions of the most diminutive 
zoophytes, — retipora, or festinella, or the microscopic joints of 
thread-like crinoideal tentacula ; while the bolder figures that 
stand up in high relief over it are delicately sculptured shells 
of antique type and proportions, Crustacea of the trilobite fam- 
ily, corals massive or branched, graceful gorgonia, and the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 87 

stems and pelvic bulbs of crinoidea. The impalpable shales 
of the hill seem to have been deposited from above, — the soil 
of aluminous shores carried far by the sea, and thrown down 
in the calm on beds of zoophytes and shells ; whereas the lime 
appears to have been elaborated, not deposited : it grew upon 
the spot slowly and imperceptibly as age succeeded age, — a 
secretion of animal life. 

After passing slowly around the hill, here striking off a 
shell, there disinterring a trilobite, — here admiring some huge 
mass of chain-coral, that, even when in its recent state, I could 
not have raised from the ground, — there examining, with the 
assistance of the lens, the minute meshes of some net-like 
festinella, scarce half a nail's breadth in area, — I sat me down 
in the sunshine in the opening of a deserted quarry, hollowed 
in the dome-like front of the hill, amid shells and corallines 
that had been separated from the shaly matrix by the disin- 
tegrating influences of the weather. The organisms lay as 
thickly around me as recent shells and corals on a tropical 
beach. The labors of Murchison had brought me acquainted 
with their forms, and with the uncouth names given them in 
this late age of the world, so many long creations after they 
had been dead and buried, and locked up in rock ; but they 
were new to me in their actually existing state as fossils ; and 
the buoyant delight with which I squatted among them, glass 
in hand, to examine and select, made me smile a moment after, 
when I bethought me that my little boy Bill could have shown 
scarce greater eagerness, when set down, for the first time, in 
his third summer, amid the shells and pebbles of the sea-shore. 
But I daresay most of my readers, if transported for a time to 
the ocean shores of Mars or of Venus, would manifest some 
such eagerness in ascertaining the types in which, in these 
remote planets, the Creator exhibits life. And here, strewed 



88 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

thickly around me, were the shells and corals of the Silurian 
ocean,- -an ocean quite as dissimilar in its productions to that 
of the present day, as the oceans of either Mars or Venus. It 
takes a great deal to slacken the zeal of some pursuits. I 
have been told by a relative, now deceased, — a man strongly 
imbued with a taste for natural history, who fought under 
Abercromby in Egypt, — that though the work was rather 
warm on the day he first leaped ashore on that celebrated 
land, and the beach somewhat cumbered by the slain, he could 
not avoid casting a glance at the white shells which mingled 
with the sand at his feet, to see whether they greatly differed 
from those of his own country; and that one curious shell, 
which now holds an honored place in my small collection, he 
found time to transfer, amid the sharp whizzing of the bullets, 
to his waistcoat pocket. 

I filled a small box with minute shells and corals, — terebra- 
tulae of some six or eight distinct species, a few leptsena? and 
orthes, a singularly beautiful astrea, figured by Murchison as 
Astrea ananas, or the pine-apple astrea, several varieties of 
cyathophyllum, and some two or three species of porites and 
limaria. To some of the corals I found thin mat-like zoophytes 
of the character of flustrae attached ; to others, what seemed 
small serpulse. Out of one mass of shale I disinterred the 
head of a stone lily, — the Cyathocrinites pyriformis, — beauti- 
fully preserved ; in a second mass I found the fully-expanded 
pelvis and arms of a different genus, — the Actinocrinites mo- 
?iilifor??iis, — but it fell to pieces ere I could extricate it. I 
was more successful in detaching entire a fine specimen of 
what I find figured by Murchison, though with a doubtful note 
of interrogation attached, as a gorgonia or sea-fan. I found 
much pleasure, too, in acquainting myself, though the speci- 
mens were not particularly fine, with disjointed portions of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 89 

trilob tea, — now a head turned up, — now the caudle portion 
of the shell, exhibiting the inner side and abdominal rim, — 
now a few detached joints. In some of the specimens, — inva- 
riably headless ones, — the body seems scarce larger than tha* 
of a common house-fly. Here, as amid the upper deposits at 
Sedgley, I was struck with the general resemblance of the 
formation to the Carboniferous Limestone : not a few of the 
shells are at least generically similar ; there is the same abun- 
dance of crinoidese and festinellae ; and in some localities nearly 
the same profusion of the large and the minuter corals. And 
though trilobites are comparatively rare in the Mountain Lime- 
stone of Britain, I have found in that of Dryden, in the neigh- 
borhood of Edinburgh, the body of at least one trilobite, which 
I could not distinguish from a species of frequent occurrence 
in the Wenlock Limestone, — the Asaphus Caudatus. I may 
remind the reader, in corroboration of the fact, that Buckland, 
in his " Bridgevvater Treatise," figures two decapitated speci- 
mens of this trilobite, one of which was furnished by the Car- 
boniferous Limestone of Northumberland, and the other by the 
Transition Limestone near Leominster. There obtains, how- 
ever, one striking difference between the more ancient and 
more modern deposits : I have rarely explored richly fossilifer- 
ous beds of the Mountain Limestone, without now and then 
finding the scales of a fish, and now and then the impression 
of some land-plant washed from the shore ; but in the Silurian 
hills of the Dudley coal-field, no trace of the vertebrata has yet 
been found, and no vegetable product of the land. 

The sun had got far down in the west ere I quitted the 
deserted quarry, and took my way towards the distant town, 
not over, but through the hill, by a long gloomy corridor. 1 
had been aware all day, that though apparently much alone, I 
ha^ yet near neighbors : there had been an irregular succes- 



9C FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

s.on of dull, half-smothered sounds, from the bowels of the 
eart.i ; and at times, when in contact with the naked rock, 1 
could feel, as the subterranean thunder pealed through the abyss, 
the solid mass trembling beneath me. The phenomena were 
those described by Wordsworth, as eliciting, in a scene of deep 
solitude, the mingled astonishment and terror of Peter Bell, — 

" When, to confound his spiteful mirth, 
A murmur pent within the earth, 
In the dead earth, beneath the road, 
Sudden arose ! It swept along, 
A muffled noise, a rumbling sound : 
'Twas by a troop of miners made, 
Plying with gunpowder their trade, 
Some twenty fathoms under ground." 

1 was scarce prepared, however, for excavations of such impos- 
ing extent as the one into which I found the vaulted corridor 
open. It forms a long gallery, extending for hundreds of yards 
on either hand, with an overhanging precipice bare to the hill- 
top leaning perilously over on the one side, and a range of 
supporting buttresses cut out of the living rock, and perfo- 
rated with lofty archways, planting at measured distances their 
strong feet, on the other. Through the openings between the 
buttresses, — long since divested, by a shaggy vegetation, of 
every stiff angularity borrowed from the tool of the miner, — 
the red light of evening was streaming, in well-defined patches, 
on the gray rock and broken floor. Each huge buttress threw 
its broad bar of shadow in the same direction ; and thus the 
gallery, through its entire extent, was barred, zebra-like, with 
alternate belts of sun-light and gloom, — the "ebon and ivory" 
of Sir Walter's famed description. The rawness of artificial 
excavation has long since disappeared under the slow incrusta- 
tions of myriads of lichens and mosses, — for the quarrier 
seems to have had done with the place for centuries ; and if 1 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 9] 

could have but got rid of the recollection that it had been 
scooped out by handfuls for a far different purpose than that of 
making a grotto, I would have deemed it one of the finest 
caverns I ever saw. Immediately beside where the vaulted 
corridor enters the gallery, there is a wide dark chasm in the 
floor, furnished with a rusty chain-ladder, that gives perilous 
access to the lower workings of the hill. There was not light 
enough this evening to show half-way down ; but far below, in 
the darkness, I could see the fiery glimmer of a torch reflected 
on a sheet of pitch-black water ; and I afterwards learned that 
a branch of the Dudley and Birmingham Canal, invisible for a 
full mile, has been carried thus far into the bowels of the hill. 
I crossed over the nest-like valley scooped in the summit of the 
eminence, — a picturesque, solitary spot, occupied by a corn- 
field, and feathered all around on the edges with wood ; and 
then crossing a second deep excavation, which, like the gallery 
described, is solely the work of the miner, I struck over a range 
of green fields, pleasantly grouped in the hollow between the 
Wren's-Nest-hill and the Castle-hill of Dudley, and reached 
the town just as the sun was setting. The valleys which inter- 
pose between the three Silurian islets of the Dudley basin are 
also Silurian ; and as they have been hollowed by the denuding 
agencies out of useless beds of shale and mudstone, the miner 
has had no motive to bore into their sides and bottom, or to 
cumber the surface, as in the surrounding coal-field, with the 
rums of the interior ; and so the valleys, with their three lovely 
hil.s, form an oasis in the waste. 



92 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER V. 

Dudley wgniLiant Marks of the Mining Town. — Kindly Scotch Land- 
lady. - Temperance Coffee-house. — Little Samuel the Teetotaller. — 
Curim. Incident. — Anecdote. — The Resuscitated Spinet. — Forbear- 
ance ci .ittle Samuel. — Dudley Museum ; singularly rich in Silurian 
Fossils, — Megalichthys Hibberti. — Fossils from Mount Lebanon ; very 
modern compared with those of the Hill of Dudley. — Geology pecu- 
liarly fitted to revolutionize one's Ideas of Modern and Ancient. — Fos- 
sils of extreme Antiquity furnished by a Canadian Township that had 
no name twenty years ago. — Fossils from the Old Egyptian Desert found 
to be comparatively of Yesterday. — Dudley Castle and Castle-hill. — 
Cromwell's Mission. — Castle finds a faithful Chronicler in an old 
Serving-maid. — Her Narrative. — Caves and Fossils of the Castle- 
hill. — Extensive Excavations. — Superiority of the Natural to the Arti- 
ficial Cavern. — Fossils of the Scottish Grauwacke. — Analogy between 
the Female Lobster and the Trilobite. 

The town of Dudley has been built half on the Silurian 
deposit, half on the coal-field, and is flanked on the one side by- 
pleasant fields, traversed by quiet green lanes, and on the other 
by ruinous coal-workings and heaps of rubbish. But as the 
townspeople are not "lie-wasters," we find, in at least the 
neighborhood of the houses, the rubbish heaps intersected with 
innumerable rude fences, and covered by a rank vegetation. 
The mechanics of the place have cultivated without levelling 
them, so that for acres together they present the phenomenon 
of a cockling sea of gardens, — a rural Bay of Biscay agitated 
by the ground-swell, — with rows of cabbages and beds of carrots 
riding on the tops of huge waves, and gooseberry and currant 
bushes sheltering in deep troughs and hollows. I marked, as 
I passed tr rough the streets, several significant traits of the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 93 

mining tow .1 : one of the signboards, bearing the figure of a 
brawny half-naked man, armed with a short pick, and coiled up 
like an Andre Ferrara broadsword in a peck basket, indicates 
the inn of the "Jolly Miner; " the hardware shops exhibit in 
their windows rows of Davy's safety lamps, and vast piles of 
mining tools ; and the footways show their sprinkling of rugged- 
looking men, attired in short jackets and trousers of undyed 
plaiding, sorely besmutted by the soil of an underground occu- 
pation. In some instances, the lamp still sticking in the cap, 
and the dazzled expression of countenance, as if the eye had 
not yet accommodated itself to the light, indicate the close 
proximity of the subterranean workings. I dropped into a 
respectable-looking tavern to order a chop and a glass of ale, 
and mark, meanwhile, whether it was such a place as I might 
convert into a home for a few days with any reasonable pros- 
pect of comfort. But I found it by much too favorite a resort 
of the miners, and that, whether they agreed or disputed, they 
were a noisy generation over their ale. The landlady, a kindly, 
portly dame, considerably turned of fifty, was a Scotchwoman, 
a native of Airdrie, who had long ago married an Englishman 
in her own country, and had now been settled in Dudley for 
more than thirty years. My northern accent seemed to bespeak 
her favor ; and taking it for granted that I had come into Eng- 
land in quest of employment, but had not yet been successful 
in procuring any, she began to speak comfort to my dejection, 
by assuring me that our country folk in that part of the world 
were much respected, and rose always, if they had but char 
acter, into places of trust. I had borne with me, on my homely 
suit of russet, palpable marks of my labors at Sedgley and the 
Wren's Nest, and looked, I daresay, rather geological than 
genteel. Character and scholarship, said the landlady, drawing 
her inference, were just everything in that neighborhood. Most 



94 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

of the Scotch people who came the way, however poor, haa 
both ; and so, while the Irish always remained drudges, and 
were regarded with great jealousy by the laboring English, the 
Scotch became overseers and book-keepers, sometimes even 
partners in lucrative works, and were usually well liked and 
looked up to. I could fain have taken up my abode at the 
friendly Scotchwoman's; but the miners in a neighboring 
apartment were becoming every moment more noisy; and 
when they began to strike the table with their fists till the 
glasses danced and rung, I got up, and, taking leave of my 
countrywoman, sallied into the street. 

After sauntering about the town for half an hour, I found in 
one of the lanes a small temperance cofTee-house, with an air 
of quiet sobriety about it that at once recommended it to my 
favor. Finding that most of the customers of the place went 
into the kitchen to luxuriate over their coffee in front of the 
fire, I too went into the kitchen, and took my seat on a long 
wooden settle, with tall upright back and arms, that stretched 
along the side of the apartment, on the clean red tiles. The 
English are by much a franker people than the Scotch, — less 
curious to know who the stranger may be who addresses them, 
and more ready to tell what they themselves are, and what 
they are doing and thinking ; and I soon found I could get as 
much conversation as I wished. The landlady's youngest son, 
a smart little fellow in his ninth year, was, I discovered, a stern 
teetotaller. He had been shortly before at a temperance meet- 
ing, and had been set up to make a speech, in which he had 
acquitted himself to the admiration of all. He had been a 
teetotaller for about nine years, he said, and his father was a 
teetotaller too, and his mother, and brother and sisters, were 
all teetotallers ; and he knew men, he added, who, before 
taking the pledge, had worn ragged clothes, and shoes without 



ENGLAND AND ITS PE01 LE. 95 

soles, who, on becoming teetotallers, had improved into gintle- 
men. He was now engaged in making a second speech, which 
was, however, like a good many other second speeches pro- 
duced in such circumstances, very much an echo of the first ; 
and every one who dropped in this evening, whether to visit 
the landlady and her daughters, or to drink coffee, was sure to 
question little Samuel regarding the progress of his speech. 
To some of the querists Samuel replied with great deference 
and respect; to some with no deference or respect at all. 
Condition or appearance seemed to exert as little influence 
over the mind of the magnanimous speech-maker as over that 
of the eccentric clergyman in Mr. Fitzadam's World, who paid 
to robust health the honor so usually paid to rank and title, and 
looked down as contemptuously on a broken constitution as 
most other people do on dilapidated means. But Samuel had 
quite a different standard of excellence from that of the eccen- 
tric clergyman. He had, I found, no respect save for pledged 
teetotalism ; and no words to bestow on drinkers of strong 
drink, however moderate in their potations. All mankind 
consisted, with Samuel, of but two classes, — drunkards and 
teetotallers. Two young ladies, daughters of the supervisor 
of the district, came in, and asked him how he was getting on 
with his speech ; but Samuel deigned them no reply. " You 
were rude to the young ladies, Samuel," said his mother when 
they had quitted the room ; " why did you not give them an 
answer to their question ? " — " They drink," replied the laconic 
Samuel. — "Drink ! " exclaimed his mother, — " Drink ! — the 
young ladies ! " — " Yes, drink," reiterated Samuel ; " the} have 
not taken the pledge." 

I found a curious incident which had just occurred in the 
neighborhood forming the main topic of conversation, — exacdy 
such a story as Crabbe would have chosen f: r the basis of a 



96 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

descriptive poem. A leaden pipe had been stolen a few even 
ings before from one of the town churches : it was a long ; 
ponderous piece of metal ; and the thieves, instead of carrying, 
had dragged it along, leaving behind them, as they went, a 
significant trail on grass and gravel, which had been traced on 
the morrow by the sexton to the house of an elderly couple, in 
what, for their condition, were deemed snug circumstances, and 
who for full thirty years had borne a fair character in the place. 
There lived with them two grown-up sons, and they also bore 
fair characters. A brief search, however, revealed part of the 
missing lead ; a still further search laid open a vast mine of 
purloined movables of every description. Every tile in the 
back court, every square yard in the garden, every board in the 
house-floor, covered its stolen article ; — kitchen utensils and 
fire-irons, smiths' and miners' tools, sets of weights from the 
market-place, pieces of hardware goods from the shops, garden 
railings, sewerage grates, house-spouts, — all sorts of things 
useful and useless to the purloiners, — some of them missed but 
yesterday, some of them abstracted years before, — were found 
heaped up together, in this strange jay's nest. Two-thirds of 
the people of Dudley had gone out to mark the progress of 
discovery; and as the police furrowed the garden, or trenched 
up the floor, there were few among the numerous spectators 
who were not able to detect in the mass some piece of their 
own property. I saw the seventh cart-load brought this even- 
ing to the police-office ; and every fresh visiter to the coffee- 
house carried with him the intelligence of further discoveries. 
The unhappy old man, who had become so sudden a bankrupt 
'in reputation when no one had doubted his solvency, and the 
two sons whom he had trained so ill, had been sent off to 
Gloucester jail the evening before, to abide their trial at the 
ensuing assizes. I was reminded, by the incident, of an occur- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 97 

ronce which took place some time in the last age in a rural dis- 
trict in the far north. A parish smith had lived and died with 
an unsuspected character, and the population of half the coun- 
try-side gathered to his funeral. There had been, however, a 
vast deal of petty pilfering in his time. Plough and harrow 
irons were continually disappearing from the fields and stead- 
ings of the farmers, his nearer neighbors ; not a piece of hem- 
mounting or trace-chain, not a cart-axle or wheel-rim, was 
secure ; but no one had ever thought of implicating the smith. 
Directly opposite his door there stood a wall of loose, unce- 
mented stones, against which a party of the farmers who had 
come to the burial were leaning, until the corpse should be 
brought out. The coffin was already in the passage ; the 
farmers were raising their shoulders from the wall, to take 
their places beside it; in ten minutes more the smith would 
have been put under the ground with a fair character : when, 
lo ! the frail masonry behind suddenly gave way ; the clank of 
metal was heard to mingle with the dull rumble of the stones ; 
and there, amid the rubbish, palpable as the coffin on the oppo- 
site side of the road, lay, in a scattered heap, the stolen imple- 
ments so mysteriously abstracted from the farmers. The awe- 
struck men must have buried the poor smith with feelings 
which bore reference to both worlds, and which a poet such as 
Wordsworth would perhaps know how to describe. 

My landlady's eldest son, a lad of nineteen, indulged a 
strong predilection for music, which, shortly prior to the date 
of my visit, had received some encouragement, in his appoint- 
ment as organist in one of the town churches. At a consider- 
able expense of patient ingenuity, he had fitted up an old 
spinet, until it awoke into life, in these latter days of Collards 
and Broadwoods, the identical instrument it had been a cen- 
tury before. He had succeeded, too, in acquiring no imper- 
9 



98 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

feet mastery over it ; and so, by a series of chances all very 
much out of the reach of calculation, I, who till now had never 
seen but dead spinets, — rickety things of chopped wainscot, 
lying in waste garrets from the days of the grandmothers and 
great-grandmothers of genteel families, — was enabled to culti- 
vate acquaintance with the capabilities of a resuscitated spinet, 
vocal and all alive. It gave me the idea, when at its best, of a 
box full of Jew's harps, all twanging away at the full extent of 
their compass, and to the best of their ability. The spirit of 
the musician, however, made such amends for the defects of 
his instrument, that his evening performances, carried on when 
his labors for the day had closed, were exceedingly popular ill 
the neighborhood: the rude "miner paused under the windows 
to listen; and groups of visiters, mostly young girls, came 
dropping in every night to enjoy the nice fresh melodies brought 
out of the old musty spinet. Lovers of the fine arts draw 
naturally together ; and one of the most frequent guests of the 
coffee-house was an intelligent country artist, with whom I had 
scraped acquaintance, and had some amusing conversation. 
With little Samuel the speech-maker I succeeded in forming a 
friendship of the superlative type ; though, strange to relate, it 
must be to this day a profound mystery to Samuel whether his 
Jidus Achates the Scotchman be a drinker of strong drink or 
a teetotaller. Alas for even teetotalised human nature, when 
placed in trying circumstances ! Samuel and I had a good 
many cups of coffee together, and several glasses of Sampson, 
— a palatable Dudley beverage, compounded of eggs, milk, 
and spicery; and as on these occasions a few well-directed 
coppers enabled him to drive hard bargains with his mother for 
his share of the tipple, he was content to convert in my behalf 
the all-important question of the pledge into a moot-point of no 
particular concernment. I unfortunately left Dudley ere he 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 99 

had an opportunity presented him of delivering his second 
speech. But he entertained, he assured me, no fears for the 
result. It was well known in the place, he said, that he was 
to speak at the first temperance meeting; there were large 
expectations formed, so the audience could not be other than 
very numerous and attentive ; and he was quite satisfied he 
had something worth while to give them. My friend Samuel 
bore a good deal of healthy precocity about him. It would be, 
of course, consummately absurd to found aught on a single in- 
stance ; but it has been so often remarked that English chil- 
dren of the lively type develop into cleverness earlier than the 
Scotch, that the observation has, in all likelihood, some found- 
ation in reality. I find, too, from the experiments of Professor 
Forbes, of Edinburgh, that the English lad in his sixteenth, 
seventeenth, and eighteenth years, possesses more bodily 
strength than the Scot of the same years and standing, and 
that it is not until their nineteenth year that the young men 
of both countries meet on a footing of equality. And it seems 
not irrational to infer, that the earlier development of body in 
the case of the embryo Englishman should be accompanied by 
a corresponding development of mind also, — that his school 
exercises should be better than those of the contemporary Scot, 
and his amateur verses rather more charged with meaning, and 
more smoothly rounded. 

Dudley has its Geological Museum, — small, but very valu- 
able in some departments, and well arranged generally. Its 
Silurian organisms are by far the finest I ever saw. No sum 
of money would enable the fossil collector to complete such a 
set. It contains original specimens of the trilobite family, of 
which, in other museums, even the British, one finds but the 
casts. Nor can anything be more beautiful than its groups 
of delicately relieved crinoidea of all the different Silurian 



100 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

genera, — some ol them in scarce less perfect keeping than 
when they spread out their many-jointed arms in quest of 
prey amid the ancbnt seas. It contains, however, none of the 
vertebral remains furnished by the celebrated bone-bed of the 
Upper Ludlow rocks, nor any of the ichthyolitic fragments 
found still lower down ; though, of course, one misses them 
all the more from the completeness of the collection in con- 
temporary organisms ; and its group of Old Red Sandstone 
fossils serves but to contrast the organic poverty of this system 
in its development in England, with the vast fossil riches which 
it exhibits in our northern division of the island. The neigh- 
boring coal-field I found well represented by a series of plants 
and ichthyolites ; and I had much pleasure in examining, 
among the latter, one of the best preserved specimens of Mega- 
lichthys yet found, — a specimen disinterred some years ago 
from out an ironstone bed near Walsall, known to the miners 
as the " gubbin iron." The head is in a remarkably fine state 
of keeping : the strong enamelled plates, resembling pieces of 
japanned mail, occupy their original places ; they close round 
the snout as if tightly riveted down, and lie nicely inlaid in 
patterns of great regularity on the broad forehead ; the surface 
of each is finely punctulated, as if by an exceedingly minute 
needle ; most of them bear, amid the smaller markings, eyelet- 
like indentations of larger size, ranged in lines, as if they had 
been half-perforated for ornament by a tin-worker's punch ; and 
the lout ensemble is that of the head of some formidable reptile 
encased in armor of proof: though, from the brightly burnished 
surface of the plates, the armature resembles rather that of 
some of the more brilliant insects, than that common to fishes 
or reptiles. The oxipital covering of the crocodile is perhaps 
more than equally strong, but it lacks the glossy japan, and 
the tilt-yard cast, if I may so speak, of the many-jointed head- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 101 

piece of the Megalichthys. The occipital plates descend no 
lower than the nape, where they join on to thickly-set ranges 
of glittering quadrangular scales of considerable size and great 
thickness, that gradually diminish, and become more angular 
as they approach the tail. The fins are unluckily not indi- 
cated in the specimen. In all fossil fish, of at least the Sec- 
ondary and Palaeozoic formations, the coloring depends on the 
character of the deposits in which they have lain entombed. 1 
have seen scales and plates of the Megalichthys, in some in- 
stances of a sienna yellow, in some of a warm chestnut brown ; 
but the finer specimens are invariably of a glossy black. The 
Dudley Megalichthys, and a Megalichthys in the possession of 
Dr. John Fleming, which, though greatly h ss entire, is valua- 
ble, from exhibiting the vertebral column of the animal, are 
both knights in black armor.^ 

* This ancient fish was at one time confounded with its contemporary, 
the Holoptychius Hibberii. A jaw of the latter animal, with its slim 
ichthyolite teeth bristling around its huge reptile tusks, may be seen 
figured as that of Megalichthys, in the singularly interesting Memoir of 
Dr. Hibbert on the Limestone of Burdie House , and we find single teeth 
similarly misassigned in some other geological works of credit. But no 
two ichthyolites in the geologic scale in reality less resemble each other 
than these two fish of the Coal Measures. The Megalichthys, from head 
to tail, was splendent with polished enamel ; the Holoptychius was, on 
the contrary, a dull-coated fish. The Megalichthys rarely exceeded four 
feet in length, and commonly fell short of three ; the Holoptychius was 
one of the most gigantic of the ganoids : some individuals, judging from 
the fragments, must, like the great basking shark of the northern seas, 
have exceeded thirty feet in length. The scales of the Megalichthys are 
smooth, quadrangular, and of great thickness, but rarely exceed an inch, 
or three quarters of an inch, across ; those of the Holoptychius are thin, 
nearly circular in form, thickly ridged on the upper surface, and vary 
from an inch to more than five inches in diameter. The head of the 
Megalichthys was covered, as has been shown, with brightly-japanned 
plates ; that of the Holoptychius, with plates thickly fretted on the sur 
face, like pieces )f shagreen, only the tubercles are more confluent, and 
9* 



102 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Among the donations to the Dudley Museum, illustrative of 
the geology of foreign parts, I saw an interesting group of 
finely-preserved fossil fish from Mount Lebanon, — a very an- 
cient mountain, in its r nation to human history, compared with 
the Castle-hill of Dudley (which, however, begins to loom 
darkly through the haze of the monkish annalists as early as 
the year 700, when Dud the Saxon built a stronghold on its 
summit), but an exceedingly recent hill in its relation to the 
geologic eras. The geologist, in estimating the respective ages 
of the two eminences, places the hill with the modern history 
immensely in advance of the hill with the ancient one. The 
fish dug out of the sides of Lebanon, some five or six thousand 
feet over the level of the sea, are all fish of the modern type, 
with horny scales and bony skeletons ; and they cannot belong 

lie ranged in irregular ridges. It may be mentioned in the passing, that 
the Holoptychius of the Coal Measures, if there be value in the distin- 
guishing characteristics of Owen, — and great value there certainly is, — 
was not even generically related to the Holoptychius of the Old Red Sand- 
stone. The reptile teeth of the Old Red Holoptychius are of bone, marked 
by the true dendrodic character of the genus, and so thickly cancellated 
towards the base, as to resemble, in the cross section, pieces of open lace- 
work. The reptile teeth of the Holoptychius Hibberti, on the contrary, 
are of ivory, presenting towards the point, where the surface is smooth 
and unfurrowed, the common tubular, radiating character of that sub- 
stance, and exhibiting towards the base, where the Gothic-like rodding is 
displayed, a strange intricacy of pattern, that becomes more involved as 
we cut lower down, till what in the middle section resembles the plait- 
ing of a ruff seen in profile, is found to resemble, immediately over the 
line where the base rests on the jaw, the labyrinthine complexity of a 
Runic knot. The scales of the creatures, too, are very dissimilar in their 
microscopic structure, though both possess in common ridged surfaces, — 
the only point of resemblance from which their generic identity has been 
inferred. Even the internal structure of their occipital plates is wholly 
different. So far as is yet known, the Coal Measures contain no Holopty- 
chius akin to the dendn lie genus of that name so abundant in the Old 
Red Sandstone. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 103 

to a rerr.oter period, Agassiz tells us, than the times of the 
Chalk. Fish were an ancient well-established order in these 
comparatively recent days of the Cretaceous system ; whereas 
their old Placoid predecessors, contemporary with the Crustacea 
hrachipoda of the Hill of Dudley, seem but to have just started 
into being at the earlier time, as the first-born of their race, 
and must have been regarded as mere upstart novelties among 
the old plebeian crustaceans and molluscs they had come to 
govern. The trilobites of Dudley are some four or five crea- 
tions deeper in the bygone eternity, if I may so speak, than the 
cycloids and ctenoids of Lebanon. I was a good deal struck, 
shortly before leaving home, by this curious transposition of 
idea which Geology in such cases is suited to accomplish. I 
found waiting my inspection, one morning in the house-lobby, 
a box and basket, both filled with fossils. Those in the basket, 
which had been kindly sent me by Dr. John Wilson, of Bom- 
bay, consisted of ichthyolites and shells from the Holy Land, 
and fossil wood from the old Egyptian desert ; while those in 
the box, which had been obligingly transmitted me by Dr. 
James Wilson, of Upper Canada, — a gentleman who, amid the 
wild backwoods, with none to assist and few to sympathize, 
has cultivated a close acquaintance with science for its own 
sake, — had been collected in the modern township of Paken- 
ham, not far from the banks of the Ottawa. The fossil wood 
of the old desert — unequivocally dicotyledonous, of the oak 
or mahogany structure — could not, I found, be older than the 
Tertiary period : the fish and shells of Palestine, like those of 
the Dudley Museum, belong apparently to the times of the 
Ch?/kj but the organisms of the modern township, that had no 
name twenty years ago, boasted an incomparably higher an- 
tiq aity : they consisted of corals, Crustacea, and cephalopoda, 
from the Lower Silurians. 



104 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

No one who visits Dudley should omit seeing its castle and 
castle-hill. The castle, a fine old ruin of the true English 
type, with moat, court and keep, dungeon and treble gateway, 
chapel, guard-room and hall, resembles in extent rather a 
ruinous village than a single building; while the hill on which 
it stands forms, we find, a picturesquely wooded eminence, 
seamed w : th rough, bosky ravines, and bored deep with gloomy 
chasms, that were excavated centuries ago as limestone quar- 
ries. Bug their lime has been long since exhausted, and the 
miner now plies his labors unseen, though not unheard, deep 
amid the bowels of the mountain. The visiter may hear, in 
recesses the most recluse and solitary, the frequent rumble of 
his subterraneous thunder, and see the aspen trembling in the 
calm, under the influence of the earthquake-like tremor com- 
municated to it from beneath. 

The old keep, by much the strongest and most ancient por- 
tion of the building, rises on the highest part of the eminence, 
and commands the town below, part of which lies grouped 
around the hill-foot, almost within pistol-shot of the walls. In 
•;he olden time, this fortress occupied the centre of an extensive 
woodland district, and was known as the " Castle of the 
Woods." It had some rather high-handed masters in its day, 
— among the rest, the stern Leofric, husband of the Lady 
Godiva, so celebrated in chronicle and song for her ride through 
Coventry. Even as late as the close of the reign of Elizabeth, 
a lord of Dudley, at feud with a neighboring proprietor, ances- 
tor of the well-known Lord Lyttleton, issued from the triple 
gateway, " having," says a local historian of the time, " one 
hundred and forty persons with him, weaponed, some with 
bows and sheffes of arrows, some with forest-bills and stave*, 
and came to Mr. Lyttleton's lands at Prestwood and Ashwood ; 
and out of Ashwood he took three hundred and forty-one 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 105 

sheep, and soused some of his company drive them towards 
Dudley; and therewith not satisfied, he entered also into the 
enclosed grounds at Prestwood, and there, with great vio- 
lence, chased fourteen kyne, one bull, and eight fat oxen, and 
brought them to Dudley Castle, and kept them within the 
walls of the castle ; and part of the said cattle and sheep he 
did kill and eat, and part he sent to Coventry, guarded by sixty 
men strongly armed with bows and arrows, caly vers, and forest- 
bills, there to be sold." Somewhat rough doings these, and 
rather of a Scotch than an English type : they remind one of a 
Highland creach of the days of Rob Roy. England, however, 
had a boy born to it twenty years after the event, who put an 
effectual stop to all such acts of lordly aggression for the 
future ; and the keep of Dudley Castle shows how. Two of 
its rock-like towers, with their connecting curtain, remain 
scarce less entire than in the days of Dud or of Leofric ; but 
the other two have disappeared, all save their foundations, and 
there have been thirty-two-pound shot dug out from among the 
ruins, that in some sort apologize for their absence. The iron 
hand of Cromwell fell heavy on the Castle of the Woods, — a 
hand, of which it may be said, as Barbour says of the gaunt- 
leted hand of the Bruce, that 

" Where it strook with even stroke, 
Nothing mocht against it stand ;" 

and sheep and cattle have been tolerably safe in the neighbor- 
hood ever since. It was a breezy, sunshiny day on which I 
climbed the hill to the old keep, along a steep paved roadway 
u'ershaded by wood. In the court behind, — a level spa:e 
some two or three acres in extent, flanked on the one side by 
the castle buildings, and on the other by a gray battlemented 
waL, — I f :>und a company of the embodied pensioners going 



106 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

through then exercises, in their uniforms of red and blue. 
Most of thei ] — old, gray-headed veterans, with medals dan- 
gling at thei..' breasts, and considerably stiffened by years — 
seemed to perform their work with the leisurely air of men 
quite aware that it was not of the greatest possible importance. 
The broken ruins lay around them, rough with the scars of 
conflict and conflagration ; and the old time-worn fortress har- 
nonized well with the old time-worn soldiery. 

It must be a dull imagination that a scene so imposing as 
that presented by the old castle does not set in motion : its 
gloomy vaults and vast halls, — its huge kitchen and roomy 
chapel, — its deep fosse and tall rampart, — its strong portcul- 
lised gateway and battered keep, — are all suggestive of the 
past, — of many a picturesque group of human creatures, 
impressed, like the building in which they fed and fought, 
worshipped and made merry, with the character of a bygone 
age. The deserted apartments, as one saunters through them, 
become crowded with life ; the gray, cold, evanished centuries 
assume warmth and color. In Dudley, however, the imagina- 
tion receives more help in its restorations than in most other 
ruins in a state of equal dilapidation. The building owes 
much to a garrulous serving-maid, that followed her mistress, 
about a hundred and twenty years ago, to one of its high festi- 
vals, — a vast deal more, at least, than to all the great lords 
and ladies that ever shared in its hospitality. The grand- 
mother of that Mrs. Sherwood of whom, I daresay, most of my 
readers retain some recollection since their good-boy or good- 
girl days, as a pleasing writer for the young, was a ladies' 
maid, some time early in the last century, in a family of dis- 
tinction that used to visit at the castle ; and the authoress has 
embodied in her writings ore of her grandmother's descriptions 
of its vanished glories, as communicated to her by the old 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 107 

woman many years after. I must give, by way cf specimen, a 
few characteristic snatches of her story, — a story which will 
scarce fail to recall to the learned in romance the picturesque 
narratives of Mrs. Katcliffe's garrulous housekeepers, or the 
lengthened anecdotes of the communicative Annette. 

" I was delighted," says the old serving-maid, " when it was 
told me that I was to accompany my lady and a friend of hers 
to the castle, in order that I might be at hand to wait on them 
next morning; for they were to stay at the castle all night. 
So we set out in the coach, the two ladies being seated in front, 
and myself with my back to the horses ; and it was quite dark 
when we arrived at the foot of the castle-hill, for it was the 
dead of winter, and the snow lay on the ground. However, 
there were lamps fixed upon the trees, all along the private 
road up to the castle ; and there were lights upon the towers, 
which shone as beacons far and near ; for it was a great day 
at the castle. The horses, though we had four, had hard 
work to drag us up the snowy path. However, we got up in 
time ; and, passing under the gateway, we found ourselves in 
the court-yard. But oh, how different did it then show to 
what it does now, being littered with splendid equipages, and 
sounding with the rattling of wheels and the voices of coach- 
men and grooms calling to each other, and blazing with lights 
5rom almost every window ! and the sound of merry voices, and 
of harps and viols, issued from every doorway. At length, 
having drawn up to the steps of the portico, my ladies were 
handed out by a young gentleman wearing an embroidered 
waistcoat with deep pockets, and a bag-wig and sword ; and I 
was driven to another door, where I was helped out by a foot- 
boy, who showed me the way to the housekeeper's room." 
The serving-maid then goes on to describe the interior. She 
saw on the dark wainscoting hard, stiff paintings, in faded 



108 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

colors, of antiquely-dressed dames, and knights in armor; but 
the housemaid, she said, could tell her nothing of their history. 
Some of the rooms were hung with tapestry ; some with tar- 
nished paper that looked like cut velvet. The housekeeper 
was an old, bustling dame, " with a huge bunch of keys hang- 
ing to her girdle by a strong chain of steel." " There was not 
a window which was sashed, but all were casemented in stone 
frames, many of the panes being of colored glass ; and there 
was scarce one chamber on the same level with another, but 
there was a step to go up or a step to go down to each : the 
chimney-pieces of carved wood or stone were so high, that I 
could hardly reach to the mantel-shelves when standing on 
tiptoe ; and instead of grates, such as we have now, there were 
mostly dogs upon the hearths. The chairs were of such a size, 
that two of the present sort would stand in the room of one ; 
and the doors, though very thick and substantial, were each an 
inch or two from the floor, so that the wind whistled all along 
the passages, rattling and shaking the casements, and often 
making a sort of wild and mournful melody." 

The great hall which constituted the grand centre of the fes- 
tivities of this evening now forms one of the most dilapidated 
portions of the ruin. The front walls have fallen so low that 
we can barely trace their foundations, and a rank vegetation 
waves over the floor. I think it is Macculloch who says, that 
full one-half the ancient strongholds of our Scotch Highlands 
thrown together into a heap would be found scarce equal in the 
aggregate to a single English castle of the more magnificent 
type ; and certainly enough remains of the great hall here, 
broken as it is, to illustrate, and in some degree corroborate the 
remark, disparaging to the Highlands as it may seem. We 
can still ascertain that this single room measured seventy-five 
feet in length by fifty-six feet in breadth, — a space considera- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 109 

bly more than equal in area to most of our north-country for- 
talices. It was remarkable at one time for containing, says 
Dr. Plott, an oak table, composed of a single plank, three feet 
In breadth, that extended from end to end of the apartment. 
The great hall must have presented a gay scene when seen 
by the grandmother of Mrs. Sherwood. " Three doors opened 
into it from the gallery above. At one of these," says the 
garrulous old woman, " all the servant-maids were standing, 
and I took my place among them. I can hardly tell how to 
describe this hall to you, unless by saying that the roof was 
arched or groined, not unlike that of some ancient church 
which you may have seen ; and it had large and lofty win- 
dows, painted and carved in the fashion called Gothic. It was 
illuminated with many candles, in sconces of brass hanging 
from the ceiling; and every corner of it, wide as it was, was 
bright as the day. There was a gallery at the further end of 
it, filled with musicians ; and the first and foremost among 
them was an old harper from Wales, who used, in those days, 
to travel the country with his harp on his back, ever presenting 
himself at the doors of the houses where feasts and merry- 
makings might be expected. The dresses of the time were very 
splendid ; the ladies shone with glossy silks and jewels, and 
the gentlemen with embroidery and gold and silver lace ; and 
I have still before me the figures of that gay and distinguished 
company, for it consisted of the noble of the land, with their 
families. It may be fancy ; but I do not think I ever in these 
days see faces so fair as some of those which shone that night 
in the old castle-hall." Such were some of the reminiscences 
of the ancient serving-maid. A few years after the merry- 
making which she records, the castle was deserted by the 
inmates for a more modern building; and in 1750 it was 
reduced by fire to a blackened group of skeleton walls. A 
10 



110 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

gang of coiners were suspected at the time of harboring among 
its concealments ; and the conflagration is said to have been 
the work of an incendiary connected with the gang. An unfin- 
ished stanza, spelt amiss, and carved rudely on one of the soft 
sandstone lintels, used to be pointed out as the work of the 
felon; but, though distinctly legible till within the ast few 
years, it can now be pointed out no longer : — 

" Water went round it, to garde it from the Fooe . 
The fire shall burn it " 

Can the reader complete the couplet ? If not, he may be per- 
haps apt to suspect the man who first filled up the gap with 
sense and rhyme as the original author, and, of course, the 
incendiary. But though every boy and girl in Dudley has 
learned to add the missing portion, no one seems to know who 
the individual was who supplied it first. 

" Water went round it, to garde it from the Fooe : 
The fire shall burn it, and lay its towers low." 

Some of the dells and caverns of the castle-hill I found 
exceedingly picturesque. Its limestone is extensively employed 
in the smelting furnaces as a flux. Every ton of clay ironstone 
must be mixed up with half a ton of lime, to facilitate the 
separation of the metal from the argillaceous dross ; and so, 
from the earliest beginnings of the iron-trade, the work of 
excavation has been going on in the Hill of Dudley. The first 
smelter who dug up a barrowful of ironstone to make a sword 
must have come to the hill for half a barrowful of lime, to mix 
up with the brown mass, ere he committed it to the fire. And 
so some of the caverns are very vast, and, for caverns of man's 
making, very old ; and some of the open dells, deserted by the 
quarrier for centuries, bear amid their precipces trees of large 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. Ill 

size, and have long since lost every mark of the tool. The 
recesses of the hill, like those of the Wren's Nest, are threaded 
by a subterranean canal, which, in passing under the exca- 
vation of an ancient quarry, opens to the light ; and so in a 
thickly-wooded walk, profoundly solitary, when one is least 
thinking of the possibility of such a thing, one comes full upon 
a wide and very deep chasm overhung by trees, the bottom of 
which is occupied by a dark basin, crowded with boats. We 
may mark the boatmen emerging from out the darkness by 
one cavern, and reentering it by another. They see the sun, 
and the sky, and the green trees, far above, but nothing within 
reach save rough rocks and muddy water ; and if they do not 
think, as they pass, of human life, bounded by the darkness of 
the two eternities, with no lack of the gloomy and the turbid 
in closest contact, but with what the heart most desires hung 
too high for the hand to grasp, it is not because there are no 
such analogies furnished by the brief passage through, but 
merely because they have failed to discover them. 

A little further on there may be found a grand though some- 
what sombre cavern, which, had it come direct from the hand 
of nature, I would have perhaps deemed one of the most 
remarkable I ever explored. We enter a long narrow dell, 
wooded atop, like all the others, with an overhanging precipice 
rising tall on the one side, and the strata sloping off on the 
other in a continuous plane, like the face of a rampart. Nor 
is this sloping wall devoid of its characteristic sculpturings. 
We find it fretted with shells and corals, and well-marked 
heads and joints of the Calymene Blumenbachii, so abundant an 
organism in these rocks as to be familiarly known as the Dud- 
ley trilobite. I scarce know on what principle it should have 
occurred ; but certainly never before, even when considerably 
less familiar with the wonders of Geology, was I so impressed 



112 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

by the appearance of marine fossils in an inland district, as 
among these wooded solitudes. Perhaps the peculiarity of 
their setting, if I may so speak, by heightening the contrast 
between their present circumstances and their original habitat, 
gave increased effect to their appeals to the imagination. The 
green ocean depths in which they must have lived and died 
associate strangely in the mind with the forest retreats, a full 
hundred miles from the sea-shore, in which their remains now 
lie deposited. Taken with their accompaniments, they serve 
to remind one of that style of artificial grotto-work in which 
corals and shells are made to mingle with flowers and mosses. 
The massy cyathophyllum sticks out of the sides of gray lich- 
ened rocks, enclasped by sprigs of ivy, or overhung by twigs 
of thorn and hazel ; deep-sea terebratulse project in bold relief 
from amid patches of the delicate wood sorel ; here a macerated 
oak-leaf, with all its skeleton fibres open as a net, lies glued by 
the damps beside some still more delicately reticulated festi- 
nella ; there a tuft of graceful harebells projects over some 
prostrate orthoceratite ; yonder there peeps out from amid a 
drapery of green liver-wort, like a heraldic helmet from the 
mantling, the armed head of some mailed trilobite : the deep- 
sea productions of the most ancient of creations lie grouped, as 
with an eye to artistic effect, amid the floral productions of our 
own times. At the further end of this retired dell, so full of 
interest to the geologist, we see, where the rock closes, two 
dark openings separated by a rude limestone column. One of 
these forms a sort of window to the cavern within, so exceed- 
ingly lofty in the sill as to be inaccessible to the explorer ; 
through the other we descend along a damp, mouldy path, and 
reach the twilight bank of a canal, which stretches away into 
the darkness between two gloomy walls of rock of vast height, 
connected half-way up, — as flooring-beams connect the walls 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 113 

of a skeleton building, — by a range of what seems rafters of 
rock. The cavern had once an upper story, — a working sep- 
arated from the working below by a thin sloping floor ; and 
these stone rafters are remains of the floor, left as a sort of 
reclining buttresses, to support the walls. They form one of 
the most picturesque features of the cavern, straddling over- 
head from side to side, and receding in the more than twilight 
gloom of the place, each succeeding rafter dimmer and more 
dim, in proportion to its distance from the two openings till 
the last becomes so indistinctly visible, that if but a cloud pass 
over the sun, it disappears. A rustic bridge leads across the 
canal ; but we can see only the one end of it, — the other is 
lost in the blackness; the walls and floor are green with 
mould ; the dark water seems a sullen river of pitch : we may 
occasionally mark the surface dimpled by the track of a newt, 
or a toad puffing itself up, as if it fed on vapor, on the damp 
earthy edge ; but other inhabitants the cavern has none. I 
bethought me of the wild description of Kirke White : — 

" And as she entered the cavern wide, 

The moonbeam gleamed pale, 
And she saw a snake on the craggy rock, — 

It clung by its slimy tail. 
Her foot it slipped, and she stood aghast, 

For she trod on a bloated toad." 

Solitary as the place usually is, it presented a singularly ani- 
mated appearance six years ago, when it was visited by the 
members of the British Association, and converted by Sir 
Roderick Murchison into a geological lecture-room. He dis- 
coursed of rocks and fossils in the bowels of the hill, with the 
ponderous strata piled high on every side, like courses of Cy- 
clopean masonry, and the stony forms of the dead existing by 
millions around him. 
10* 



114 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

But, after al , there are no caverns like those of nature's 
making : they speak to the imagination in a bolder and freer 
style than any mere excavation of the quarrier, however huge ; 
and we find, in consequence, that they have almost always 
engaged tradition in their behalf. There hangs about them 
some old legend of spectral shapes seen flitting across the twi- 
light vestibule ; or of ancient bearded men, not of this world, 
standing, porter-like, beside the door; or of somnolent giants 
reposing moodily in the interior; or of over-bold explorers, who 
w r andered so deep into their recesses that they never again 
returned to the light of day. I bethought me, when in Sir 
Roderick's lecture-room, of one of the favorite haunts of my 
boyhood, — a solitary cave, ever resounding to the dash of the 
billows, — and felt its superiority. Hollowed of old by the 
waves of an unfrequented shore, just above the reach of the 
existing tide-line, — its gray roof bristling with stalactites, its 
gray floor knobbed with stalagmite, — full of all manner of 
fantastic dependencies from the top and sides, — with here 
little dark openings branching off into the living rock, and 
there unfinished columns standing out from it, roughened with 
fretted irregularities, and beaded with dew, — with a dim twi- 
light resting even at noonday within its further recesses, and 
steeped in an atmosphere of unbreathing silence, rarely broken 
save by the dash of the wave or the shriek of the sea-fowl, — 
it is at all times a place where the poetry of deep seclusion 
may be felt, — the true hermit-feeling, in which self is absorbed 
and forgotten amid the silent sublimities of nature. The unfre- 
quent visiter scares the seal from the mid-tide rock in the open- 
ing, or encounters the startled otter in its headlong retreat to 
the sea. But it seemed redolent, when I last saw it, of a still 
higher poetry. Night had well-nigh fallen, though the nearly 
vanquished daylight still struggled with the darkness. The 
mo-m at full rose slowly over the sea, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 115 

" All pale and dim, as if from rest 
The ghost of the late buried sun 
Had crept into the skies." 

The levei oeam fell along a lonely coast, on brown precipice 
and gray psbbly shore, here throwing into darker shade some 
wooded recess, there soliciting into prominence some tall cliff 
whitened by the cormorant. The dark-browed precipice, in 
which the cavern is hollowed, stood out in doubtful relief; 
while the cavern itself — bristling gray with icicles, that 
showed like the tags of a dead dress — seemed tenanted, in 
the exaggerative gloom, with all manner of suggestive shapes. 
Here a sheeted uncertainty sat beside the wall, or looked out 
from one of the darker openings upon the sea ; there a broken 
skeleton seemed grovelling upon the floor. There was a wild 
luxury in calling to mind, as one gazed from the melancholy 
interior' on the pale wake of the moon, that for miles on either 
hand there was not a human dwelling, save the deserted hut 
of a fisherman who perished in a storm. The reader may 
perhaps remember, that in exactly such a scene does the poet 
Collins find a home for his sublime personification of Fear. 

" Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell, 

Or in some hollowed seat, 

'Gainst which the big waves beat, 
With shuddering, meek, submitted thought, 
Hear drowning seamen's cries in tempests brought ? " 

1 spent the greater part of a week among the fossiliferous 
deposits of Dudley, and succeeded in procuring a tolerably fair 
set of fossils, and in cultivating a tolerably competent acquaint- 
ance with the appearances which they exhibit in their various 
states of keeping. It is an important matter to educate the 
eye. Should there be days of hea.th and the exploration of 
the Scottish Grauwacke in store for me, I may find my brief 



116 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

sojourn among the English Silurians of some little advantage. 
Fossils in our ancient southern deposits are exceedingly rare ; 
and there is, in consequence, a lack of data by which to ascer- 
tain the age of the formations in which they occur, and which 
they fail sufficiently to mark. The tablets are devoid of 
inscriptions, save that we here and there find a half-effaced 
character, or the outline of some sorely worn hieroglyphic. 
And yet, had the few fossils hitherto discovered been preserved 
and brought together, their joint testimony might be found to 
amount to something. The Graptolites of Peebles-shire and 
Galloway are tolerably well known as identical with English 
species, — the Graptolithus Ludensis and Graptolithus foliaceus, 
— which possess, however, a wide range in the more ancient 
rocks, passing downwards from beds of the Upper Silurian, to 
deposits that lie deep in what was once termed the Cambrian 
series. In Peebles-shire, at Wrae-hill, says Mr. Nicol, shells 
have been detected in a Grauwacke limestone, now unluckily 
no longer accessible. It is stated by Mr. Maclaren, in his elab- 
orate and singularly satisfactory Treatise on the Geology of 
Fife and the Lothians, that he succeeded in disinterring two 
organisms, — a small orthoceratite, and what seemed to be a 
confused accumulation of the shattered fragments of minute 
trilobites, — from out of one of the Grauwacke patches which 
occur among the Pentlands. I have been informed by the late 
Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted friend of Sir Walter Scott, 
that he once disinterred a large bivalve from amid the Grau- 
wackes of Selkirkshire. The apparent remains of broken tere- 
bratuloe have been found in various localities in the Grauwacke 
of Galloway, and atrypae and tentaculites in a rather equivocal 
deposit at Girvan, deemed Silurian. Were the various scat- 
tered fragments of the fossiliferous record to be brought care- 
fully together, they might be found sufficiently complete to give 



EN3LAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 117 

one at least a few definite ideas regarding the times which 
preceded in Scotland the age of the Coccosteus and Pterichthys. 
There wons a barber in Dudley, who holds a sort of fossil 
agency between the quarrier and the public, of whom I pur- 
chased several fine trilobites, — one of them, at least, in the 
most perfect state of keeping I have yet seen : the living crea- 
ture could not have been more complete in every plate and 
joint of the head and back ; but, as in all the other specimens 
of trilobite known to the geologist, it presents no trace of the 
abdominal portion. I procured another specimen rolled up in 
the peculiar ball-form so often figured, with the tail in contact 
with the head. It seems not unworthy of remark, that the 
female lobster, when her spawn is ripening in an external patch 
on her abdomen, affects for its protection the same rolled form. 
Her dorsal plates curve round from the joint at the carpace, 
till the tail-flap rests on her breast; and the multitudinous 
dark-colored eggs, which, having no hard shell of their own 
to protect them, would be otherwise exposed to every hungry 
marauder of the deep, are thus covered up by the strong mail 
with which the animal is herself protected. When we take 
the fact into account, that in no specimen of trilobite, however 
well preserved, do we find abdominal plates, and that the ball- 
like form is so exceedingly common, may we not infer that this 
ancient crustacean was shelled on but the back and head, and 
that it coiled itself round, to protect a defenceless abdomen, in 
the manner the female lobster coils itself round to protect its 
defenceless spawn ? In yet another specimen which I purchased 
from the barber there is an eye of the Asaphus Caudatus, which 
presents, in a state of tolerable keeping, its numerous rows of 
facets. So far as is yet known, the eye which first saw the 
light on this ancient earth of ours gave access to it through 
four hundred and fifty distinct spherical lenses. The barber 



118 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

had been in th 3 way of selling Dudley fossils, he told me, for a 
good many years ; and his father had been in the way of sell- 
ino- them for a good many more ; but neither he nor his father 
had ever seen among them any portion of an ichthyolite. The 
crustaceans, with their many-jointed plates and many-windowed 
eyes, ai 3, so far as is yet known, the highest organisms of the 
deposit. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 110 



CHAPTER VI. 

Stourbridge. — Effect of Plutonic Convulsion on the surrounding Scenery. 

— Hagley ; Description in the " Seasons." — Geology the true Anatomy 
of Landscape. — Geologic Sketch of Hagley. — The Road to the Races. 

— The old Stone-cutter. — Thomson's Hollow. *- His visits to Hagley. 

— Shenstone's Urn. — Peculiarities of Taste founded often on a Sub- 
stratum of Personal Character. — Illustration. — Rousseau. — Pope's 
Haunt. — Lyttelton's high Admiration of the Genius of Pope. — De- 
scription. — Singularly extensive and beautiful Landscape ; drawn by 
Thomson. — Reflection. — Amazing Multiplicity of the Prospect illus- 
trative of a Peculiarity in the Descriptions of the " Seasons." — Addi- 
son's Canon on Landscape ; corroborated by Shenstone. 

I left Dudley by the morning coach for Stourbridge, and 
arrived, all unwittingly, during the bustle of its season of peri- 
odic license, — the yearly races. Stourbridge is merely a 
smaller Wolverhampton, — built on the same lower deposit of 
the New Red Sandstone, of the same sort of red brick, and 
roofed and floored with the same sort of red tiles. The sur- 
rounding country is, however, more pleasingly varied by hill 
and valley. Plutonic convulsion from beneath has given to the 
flat incoherent formation a diversity of surface not its own ; 
and we see it tempested into waves, over the unseen trappean 
masses, like ocean over the back of some huge sea-monster. 
In passing on to the south and west, one finds bolder and still 
bolder inequalities of surface ; the hills rise higher, and are 
more richly wooded, until at length, little more than three 
miles from Stourbridge, in a locality where the disturbing rock 
has broken through, and forms a chain of picturesque trap 
eminences, there may be seen some of at once the finest and 



120 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

most celebrated scenery in England. Certainly for no scenery, 
either at home or abroad, has the Muse done more. Who, 
acquainted with the poetry of the last century, has not heard 
of Hagley, the " British Tempe," so pleasingly sung by Thom- 
son in his " Seasons," and so intimately associated, in the verse 
of Pope, Shenstone, and Hammond, with the Lord Lyttelton 
of English literature ? It was to walk over Hagley that I had 
now turned aside half-a-day's journey out of my purposed route. 
Rather more from accident than choice, there were no poets 
with whom I had formed so early an acquaintance as with the 
English poets who flourished in the times of Queen Anne and 
the first two Georges. I had come to be scarce less familiar 
with Hagley and the Leasowes, in consequence, than Reuben 
Butler, when engaged in mismanaging his grandmother's farm, 
with the agriculture of the " Georgics ; " and here was my first 
opportunity, after the years of half a lifetime had come and 
gone, of comparing the realities as they now exist, with the 
early conceptions I had formed of them. My ideas of Hagley 
had been derived chiefly from Thomson, with whose descrip- 
tions, though now considerably less before the reading public 
than they have been, most of my readers must be in some 
degree acquainted. 

" The love of Nature works, 
And -warms the bosom ; till at last, sublimed 
To rapture and enthusiastic heat, 
We feel the present Deity, and taste 
The joy of God to see a happy world ! 
These are the sacred feelings of thy heart, 
Lyttelton, the friend ! Thy passions thus 
And meditations vary, as at large, 
Courting the Muse, through Hagley Park thou strayest, 
The British Tempe ! There along the dale, 
With woods o'erhung, and shagged with mossy rocks, 
Where on each hand the gushing waters play, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 121 

And down the rough cascade white dashing fall, 

Or gleam in lengthened vista through the trees, 

You silent steal, or sit beneath the shade 

Of solemn oaks that tuft the swelling mounts, 

Thrown graceful round by Nature's careless hand, 

And pensive listen to the various voice 

Of rural peace, — the herds, the flocks, the birds, 

The hollow whispering breeze, the plaint of rills, 

That, purling down amid the twisted roots 

Which creep around, their dewy murmurs shake 

On the soothed ear." 

In all the various descriptions of Hagley and the Leasowes 
which I have yet seen, however elaborate and well-written, I 
have found such a want of leading outlines, that I could never 
form a distinct conception of either place as a whole. The 
writer — whether a Thomson or a Dodsley — introduced me to 
shaded walks and open lawns, swelling eminences and seques- 
tered hollows, wooded recesses with their monumental urns, 
and green hill-tops with their crowning obelisks; but, though 
the details were picturesquely given, I have always missed 
distinct lines of circumvallation to separate and characterize 
from the surrounding country the definite locality in which 
they were included. A minute anatomical acquaintance 
with the bones and muscles is deemed essential to the painter 
who grapples with the difficulties of the human figure. Per- 
haps, when the geological vocabulary shall have become better 
incorporated than at present with the language of our common 
literature, a similar acquaintance with the stony science will 
be found scarce less necessary to the writer who describes nat- 
ural scenery. Geology forms the true anatomy — the genuine 
osteology — of landscape ; and a correct representation of the 
geological skeleton of a locality will be yet regarded, I doubt 
not, as the true mode of imparting adequate ideas of its char- 
acteristic outlines. The osteology of Hagley, if I may S3 speak, 
11 



122 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

is easily definable. On the southern shore of the Dudley coal« 
basin, and about two miles from its edge, there rises in the 
New Red Sandstone a range of trap hills about se /en miles in 
length, known as the Clent Hills, which vary in height from 
six to eight hundred feet over the level of the sea. They lie 
parallel, in their general direction, to the Silurian range, 
already described as rising, like a chain of islands, amid the 
coal; but, though parallel, they are, like the sides of the par- 
allel ruler of the geometrician when fully stretched, not oppo- 
site ; the southernmost hill of the Silurian range lying scarce 
so far to the south as the northernmost hill of the trap range. 
The New Red Sandstone, out of which the latter arises, 
forms a rich, slightly undulating country, reticulated by many 
a green lane and luxuriant hedge-row ; the hills themselves are 
deeply scoped by hollow dells, furrowed by shaggy ravines, 
and roughened by confluent eminences; and on the south- 
western slopes of one of the finest and most variegated of the 
range, half on the comparatively level red sandstone, half on 
the steep-sided billowy trap, lie the grounds of Hagley. Let 
the Edinburgh reader imagine such a trap hill as that which 
rises on the north-east between Arthur's Seat and the sea, 
tripled or quadrupled in its extent of base, hollowed by dells 
and ravines of considerable depth, covered by a soil capable of 
sustaining the noblest trees, mottled over with votive urns, 
temples, and obelisks, and traversed by many a winding walk, 
skilfully designed to lay open every beauty of the place, and he 
will have no very inadequate idea of the British Tempe sung by 
Thomson. "We find its loveliness compounded of two simple 
geologic elements, — that abrupt and variegated picturesque- 
ness for which the trap rocks are so famous, and which may be 
seen so strikingly illustrated in the neighborhood of Edinburgh ; 
and that soft-lined and level beauty, — an exquisite component 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 123 

in landscape when it does not stand too much alone, — so 
characteristic, in many localities, of the Lower New Red Sand- 
stone formation. 

I was fortunate in a clear, pleasant day, in which a dappled 
sky over head threw an agreeable mottling of light and shadow 
on the green earth below. The road to Hagley was also that 
to the races, and so there were many passengers. There were 
carts and wagons rumbling forward, crowded with eager ruddy 
faces of the round Saxon type ; and gigs and carriages in which 
the faces seemed somewhat less eager, and were certainly less 
ruddy and round. There were numerous parties, too, hurrying 
afoot : mechanics from the nearer towns, with pale unsunned 
complexions, that reminded one of the colorless vegetation 
which springs up in vaults and cellars ; stout, jovial plough- 
men, redolent, in look and form, of the open sky and the fresh 
air ; bevies of young girls in gypsy bonnets, full of an exuber- 
ant merriment, that flowed out in laughter as they went ; and 
bands of brown Irish reapers, thrown out of their calculations 
by the backward harvest, with their idle hooks slung on their 
shoulders, and fluttering in rags in a country in which one saw 
no rags but their own. And then there came, in long proces- 
sion, the boys of a free-school, headed by their masters ; and 
then the girls of another free-school, with their mistresses by 
their side ; but the boys and girls were bound, I was told, not 
for the races, but for a pleasant recess among the Clent Hills, 
famous for its great abundance of nuts and blackberries, in 
which they were permitted to spend once a-year, during the 
season of general license, a compensatory holiday. To the 
right of the road, for mile beyond mile, field succeeds field, 
each sheltered by its own rows of trees, stuck into broad waste- 
ful hedges, and which, as they seem crowded together in the 
distance, ga^'e to the remote landscape the character of a forest. 



124 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

On the left, the ground rises picturesque and high, and richly 
wooded, forming the first beginnings of the Clent Hills; and 
I could already see before me, where the sky and the hill met, 
the tufted vegetation and pointed obelisk of Hagley. 

I baited at Hagley village to take a glass of cider, which 
the warmth of the day and the dustiness of the road rendered 
exceedingly grateful; and entered into conversation with an 
old gray-headed man, of massive frame and venerable counte- 
nance, who was engaged by the wayside in sawing into slabs 
a large block of New Red Sandstone. The process, though I 
had hewn, as I told him, a great many stones in Scotland, was 
new to me ; and so I had not a few questions to ask regarding 
it, which he answered with patient civility. The block on 
which he was operating measured about six feet in length by 
four in breadth, and was from eighteen to twenty inches in 
thickness ; and he was cutting it by three draughts, parallel to 
its largest plane, into four slabs. Each draught, he said, would 
employ him about four days ; and the formation of the slabs, 
each containing a superficies of about twenty-four feet, at least 
a fortnight. He purposed fashioning them into four tomb- 
stones. Nearly half his time was occupied, he reckoned, in 
sawing, — rather hard work for an old man ; and his general 
employment consisted chiefly in fashioning the soft red sand- 
stone into door-pieces, and window-soles, and lintels, which, 
in the better brick-houses in this locality, are usually of stone, 
tastefully carved. His saw was the common toothless saw of 
the marble-cutter, fixed in a heavy w r ooden frame, and sus- 
pended by a rope from a projecting beam; and the process 
of working consisted simply in swinging it in the line of the 
draught. I would have no difficulty, he informed me, in get- 
ting admission to the Lyttelton grounds : I had but to walk up 
to the gardener'? lodge, and secure the services of one of the 



ExNGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 125 

under gardeners ; and, under his surveillance, I might wander 
over the place as long as I pleased. At one time, he said, 
people might enter the park when they willed, without guide 
or guard; but the public, left to its own discretion, had behaved 
remarkably ill : it had thrown down the urns, and chipped the 
obelisks, and scrabbled worse than nonsense on the columns 
and the trees ; and so it had to be set under a keeper, to insure 
better behavior. 

I succeeded in securing the guidance of one of the gardeners ; 
and passing with him through part of the garden, and a small 
but well-kept greenhouse, we emerged into the park, and be- 
gan to ascend the hill by a narrow inartificial path, that winds, 
in alternate sunshine and shadow, as the trees approach or 
recede, through the rich moss of the lawn. Half way up the 
ascent, where the hill-side is indented by. a deep, irregularly 
semi-circular depression, open and grassy in the bottom and 
sides, but thickly garnished along the rim with noble trees, 
there is a semi-octagonal temple, dedicated to the genius of 
Thomson, — "a sublime poet," says the inscription, " and a 
good man," who greatly loved, when living, this hollow retreat 
I looked with no little interest on the scenery that had satisfied 
so great a master of landscape ; and thought, though it might 
be but fancy, that I succeeded in detecting the secret of his 
admiration; and that the specialties of his taste in the case 
rested, as they not unfrequently do in such cases, on a sub- 
stratum of personal character. The green hill spreads out its 
mossy arms around, like the anus of a well-padded easy-chair 
of enormous proportions, imparting, from the complete seclusion 
and shelter which it affords, luxurious ideas of personal secu- 
rity and ease ; w T hile the open front permits the eye to expatiate 
on an expansive and lovely landscape. We see the ground 
immediately in front occupied by an uneven sea of tree-tops, 
11* 



126 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

chiefly oaks of noble size, that rise, at various levels, on the 
lower slopes of the park. The clear sunshine imparted to 
them this day exquisite variegations of fleecy light and shad- 
ow. They formed a billowy ocean of green, that seemed as 
if wrought in floss silk. Far beyond — for the nearer fields 
of the level country are hidden by the oaks — lies a blue laby- 
rinth of hedge-rows, stuck over with trees, and so crowded to- 
gether in the distance, that they present, as has already been 
said, a forest-like appearance; while, still further beyond, there 
stretches along the horizon a continuous purple screen, com- 
posed of the distant highlands of Cambria. 

Such is the landscape which Thomson loved. And here he 
used to saunter, the laziest and best-natured of mortal men, 
with an imagination full of many-colored conceptions, by far 
the larger part of them never to be realized, and a quiet eye, 
that took in without effort, and stamped on the memory, every 
meteoric effect of a changeful climate, which threw its tints of 
gloom or of gladness over the diversified prospect. The images 
sunk into the quiescent mind as the silent shower sinks into 
the crannies and fissures of the soil, to come gushing out, at 
some future day, in those springs of poetry which so sparkle in 
the " Seasons," or that glide in such quiet yet lustrous beauty 
through that most finished of English poems, the " Castle of 
Indolence." Never before or since was there a man of genius 
wrought out of such mild and sluggish elements as the bard of 
the " Seasons." A listless man was James Thomson ; kindly- 
hearted ; much loved by all his friends ; little given to think 
of himself; who " loathed much to write, ne cared to repeat."^ 
And to Hagley he used to come, as Shenstone tells us, in " a 

* The stanza in the " Castle of Indolence," " by another hand," "which 
portrays so happily the character of Thomson, was written by Lyttelton ; 
and there are perhaps more of those felicities of phrase which sink into 



EN3LANB AND ITS PEOPLE. 127 

hired chaise, drawn by two horses ranged lengthwise," to lie 
abed till long past mid-day, because he had " nae motive " to 
rise ; and to browse in the gardens on the sunny side of the 
peaches, with his hands stuck in his pockets. He was hourly 
expected at Hagley on one of his many visits, when the intelli- 
gence came, instead, of his death. With all his amazing inert- 
ness, he must have been a lovable man, — an essentially differ- 
ent sort of person from either of his two poetical Scotch acquaint- 
ances, Mallet or Armstrong. Quin wept for him no feigned 
tears on the boards of the theatre ; poor Collins, a person of 
warm and genial affections, had gone to live beside him at 
Richmond, but on his death quitted the place forever; even 
Shenstone, whose nature it was to think much and often of 
himself, felt life grow darker at his departure, and, true to his 
hobby, commemorated him in an urn, on the principle on 
which the late Lord Buchan was so solicitous to bury Sir Wal- 
ter Scott. " He was to have been at Hagley this week," we 
find Shenstone saying, in a letter dated from the Leasowes, in 
which he records his death, " and then I should probably have 
seen him here. As it is, I will erect an urn in Virgil's Grove 
to his memory. 1 was really as much shocked to hear of his 
death as if I had known and loved him for a number of yean?, 

the memory of a people, in the nine lines of which it consists, than in anj 
single poem of ten times the length his Lordship ever produced. 

" A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems, 

Who, void of envy, guile, and lust of gain, 
On virtue still, and nature's pleasing themes, 

Poured forth his unpremeditated strain ; 
The world forsaking with a calm disdain, 

Here laughed he careless in his easy seat ; 
Here quaffed, encircled with the joyous train, — 

Oft moralizing sage : his ditty sweet 
He loathed much to write, ne cared to repeat." 



128 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

God knows, 1 lean on a very few friends, and if they drop me, 
I become a wretched misanthrope." 

Passing upwards from Thomson's hollow, we reach a second 
and more secluded depression in the hill-side, associated with 
the memory of Shenstone ; and see at the head of a solitary 
ravine a white pedestal, bearing an urn. The trees droop 
their branches so thickly around it, that, when the eye first 
detects it in the shade, it seems a retreating figure, wrapped 
up in a winding-sheet. The inscription is eulogistic of the 
poet's character and genius. " In his verses," it tells us, with 
a quiet elegance, in which we at once recognize the hand of 
Lyttelton, " were all the natural graces, and in his manners all 
the amiable simplicity of pastoral poetry, with the sweet ten- 
derness of the elegiac." This secluded ravine seems scarce 
less characteristic of the author of the " Ode to Rural Ele- 
gance," and the " Pastoral Ballad," than the opener hollow 
below, of the poet of the " Seasons." There is no great ex- 
pansion of view, of which, indeed, Shenstone was no admirer. 
" Prospects," he says, in his " Canons on Landscape," " should 
never take in the blue hills so remotely that they be not dis- 
tinguishable from clouds ; yet this mere extent is what the vul- 
gar value." Thomson, however, though not quite one of the 
vulgar, valued it too. As seen from his chosen recess, the 
blue of the distant hills seems melting into the blue of the sky ; 
or, as he himself better describes the dim outline, 

" The Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, 
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." 

It is curious enough to find two men, both remarkable for theil 
nice sense of the beautiful in natural scenery, at issue on sc 
important a point ; but the diversity of their tastes indicates, 
one may venture to surmise, not only the opposite character of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 129 

their genius, but of their dispositions also. Shenstone was 
naturally an egotist, and, like Eousseau, scarce ever contem- 
plated a landscape without some tacit reference to the space 
occupied in it by himself. " An air of greatness," remarks the 
infirm philosopher of Geneva, " has always something melan- 
choly in it : it leads us to consider the wretchedness of those 
wdio affect it. In the midst of extended grass-plats and fine 
walks, the little individual does not grow greater ; a tree of 
twenty feet high will shelter him as well as one of sixty; he 
never occupies a space of more than three feet ; and in the 
midst of his immense possessions, is lost like a poor worm." 
Alas ! it was but a poor worm, ever brooding over its own mean 
dimensions, — ever thinking of the little entity self, and jealous, 
in its egotism, of even the greatness of nature, — that could have 
moralized in a strain so unwholesome. Thomson, the least ego- 
tistic of all poets, had no such jealousy in his composition. In- 
stead of feeling himself lost in any save vignette landscapes, it 
was his delight, wholly forgetful of self and its minute measure- 
ments, to make landscapes even larger than the life, — to become 
all eye, — and , by adding one long reach of the vision to another, 
to take in a kingdom at a glance. There are few things finer 
in English poetry than the description in which, on this princi- 
ple, he lays all Scotland at once upon the canvas. 

" Here a while the Muse, 
High hovering o'er the broad cerulean scene, 
Sees Caledonia in romantic view ; 
Her airy mountains, from the waving main 
Invested with a keen diffusive sky, 
Breathing the soul acute ; her forests huge, 
Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand 
Planted of old ; her azure lakes between, 
Poured oiit extensive, and her watery wealth 
Full ; winding deep and green her fertile vales ; 
With many a cool translucent brimming flood 



130 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Washed lovely, from the Tweed (pure parent stream, 
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed, 
With sylvan Jed, thy tributary brook), 
To where the north's inflated tempest foams 
O'er Orca's or Betubium's highest peak." 

Shenstone's recess, true to his character, excludes, as I have 
said, the distant landscape. It is, however, an exceedingly 
pleasing, though somewhat gloomy spot, shut up on every side 
by the encircling hills, — here feathered with wood, there pro- 
jecting its soft undulating line of green against the blue sky ; 
while, occupying the bottom of the hollow, there is a small 
sheltered lake, with a row of delicate lines, that dip their 
pendent branches in the water. 

Yet a little further on, we descend into an opener and more 
varied inflection in the hilly region of Hagley, which is said to 
have been as favorite a haunt of Pope as the two others of 
Thomson and Shenstone, and in which an elaborately-carved 
urn and pedestal records Lyttelton's estimate of his powers as 
a writer, and his aims as a moralist : " the sweetest and most 
elegant," says the inscription, " of English poets ; the severest 
chastiser of vice, and the most persuasive teacher of wisdom." 
Lyttelton and Pope seem to have formed mutually high esti- 
mates of each other's powers and character. In the " Satires," 
we find three several compliments paid to the " young Lyttel- 
ton," 

" Still true to virtue, and as warm as true." 

And when, in the House of Commons, one of Sir Kobert Wal- 
pole's supporters accused the rising statesman of being the 
facile associate of an "unjust and licentious lampooner," — 
for, as Sir Robert's administration was corrupt and the satirist 
severe, such was Pope's character in the estimate of the minis- 
terial majority, — he rose indignantly to say, " that he deemed 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 131 

it an honor to be received into the familiarity of so great a 
poet." But the titled paid a still higher, though perhaps un- 
designed compliment, to the untitled author, by making his 
own poetry the very echo of his. Among the English literati 
of the last century, there is no other writer of equal general 
ability, so decidedly, I had almost said so servilely, of the 
school of Pope as Lyttelton. The little crooked man, during 
the last thirteen years of his life, was a frequent visiter at 
Hagley; and it is still a tradition in the neighborhood, that in 
the hollow in which his urn has been erected he particularly 
delighted. He forgot Gibber, Sporus, and Lord Fanny; flung 
up with much glee his poor shapeless legs, thickened by three 
pairs of stockings apiece, and far from thick, after all ; and 
called the place his " own ground." It certainly does no dis- 
credit to the taste that originated the gorgeous though some- 
what indistinct descriptions of " Windsor Forest." There are 
nob.e oaks on every side, — some in their vigorous middle-age, 
invested with that " rough grandeur of bark, and wide protec- 
tion of bough," which Shenstone so admired, — some far gone 
in years, mossy and time-shattered, with white skeleton 
branches atop, and fantastic scraggy roots projecting, snake- 
like, from the broken ground below. An irregular open space 
in front permits the eye to range over a prospect beautiful 
though not extensive ; a small clump of trees rises so near the 
urn, that, when the breeze blows, the slim branch-tips lash it 
as if in sport ; while a clear and copious spring comes bubbling 
out at its base. 

I passed somewhat hurriedly through glens and glades, — 
over rising knolls and wooded slopes, — saw statues and obe- 
lisks, temples and hermitages, — and lingered a while, ere I 
again descended to the lawn, on the top of an eminence which 
commands one of the richest prospects I had yet seen. The 



132 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

landscape from this point, — by far too fine to have escaped 
the eye of Thomson, — is described in the " Seasons ;" and the 
hill which overlooks it represented as terminating one of the 
walks of Lyttelton and his lady, — that Lucy Lady Ly ttleton 
whose early death formed, but a few years after, the subject 
of the monody so well known and so much admired in the 
days of our great-grandmothers : — 

" The beauteous bride, 
To whose fair memory flowed the tenderest tear 
That ever trembled o'er the female bier." 

It is not in every nobleman's park one can have the opportunity 
of comparing such a picture as that in the " Seasons " with 
such an original. I quote, with the description, the prelimi- 
nary lines, so vividly suggestive of the short-lived happiness 
of Lyttelton : — 

" Perhaps thy loved Lucinda shares thy walk, 
With soul to thine attuned. Then Nature all 
Wears to the lover's eye a look of love ; 
And all the tumult of a guilty world, 
Tossed by the generous passions, sinks away : 
The tender heart is animated peace ; 
And, as it pours its copious treasures forth 
In various converse, softening every theme, 
You, frequent pausing, turn, and from her eyes, — 
Where meekened sense, and amiable grace, 
And lively sweetness dwell, — enraptured drink 
That nameless spirit of ethereal joy, — 
Unutterable happiness ! — which love 
Alone bestows, and on a favored few. 
Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow 
The bursting prospect spreads immense around, 
And, snatched o'er hill and dale, and wood and lawn, 
And verdant field, and darkening heath between, 
And villages embosomed soft in trees, 
And spiry towns by surging columns marked 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 133 

Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams, 

Wide stretching from the Hall, in whose kird haunt 

The Hospitable Genius lingers still, 

To where the broken landscape, by degrees 

Ascending, roughens into rigid hills, 

O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds 

That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." 

As I called up the passage on the spot where, as a yet 
unformed conception, it had first arisen in the mind of the 
writer, I felt the full force of the contrast presented by the two 
pictures which it exhibits, — the picture of a high but evan- 
escent human happiness, whose sun had set in the grave nearly 
a century ago; and the picture of the enduring landscape, 
unaltered in a single feature since Lyttelton and his lady had 
last gazed on it from the hill-top. " Alas ! " exclaimed the 
contemplative Mirza, " man is but a shadow, and life a dream." 
A natural enough reflection, surely, — greatly more so, I am 
afraid, than the solace sought by the poet Beattie under its 
depressing influence, in a resembling evanescence and insta- 
bility in all nature and in all history. 

" Art, empire, earth itself, to change are doomed : 
Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale, 
And gulfs the mountain's mighty mass entombed, 
And where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloomed." 

All very true, — none the less so, certainly, from the circum- 
stance of its being truth in advance of the age in wh «h the 
poet wrote ; but it is equally and still more emphatically true, 
that the instability of a mountain or continent is a thing to be 
contrasted, not compared, with the instability of the light clouds 
that, when the winds are up, float over it, and fling athwart 
the landscape their breadth of fitful shadow. And, alas ', what 
is human life ? " even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, 
12 



134 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and then vanisheth away." There need be no lack of memen- 
toes to remind one, as I was this day reminded by the passage 
in Thomson, what a transitory shadow man is, compared with 
the old earth which he inhabits, and how fleeting his pleasures, 
contrasted with the stable features of the scenes amid which, 
for a few brief seasons, he enjoys them. 

The landscape from the hill-top could not have been seen to 
greater advantage, had I waited for months to pick out their 
best day. The far Welsh mountains, though lessened in the 
distance to a mere azure ripple, that but barely roughened the 
line of the horizon, were as distinctly defined in the clear 
atmosphere as the green luxuriant leafage in the foreground, 
which harmonized so exquisitely with their blue. The line 
extended from far beyond the Shropshire Wrekin on the right, 
to far beyond the Worcestershire Malverns on the left. Im- 
mediately at the foot of the eminence stands the mansion-house 
of Hagley, — the " Hall," where the " hospitable genius lingers 
still ; " — a large, solid-looking, but somewhat sombre edifice, 
built of the New Red Sandstone on which it rests, and which 
too much reminds one, from its peculiar tint, of the prevailing 
red brick of the district. There was a gay party of cricket- 
players on the lawn. In front, Lord Lyttelton, a fine-looking 
young man, stripped of coat and waistcoat, with his bright 
white shirt puffed out at his waistband, was sending the ball 
far beyond bound, amid an eager party, consisting chiefly, as 
the gardener informed me, of tenants and tenants' sons ; and 
the cheering sounds of shout and laughter came merrily up the 
hill. Beyond the house rises a noble screen of wood, composed 
of some of the tallest and finest trees in England. Here and 
there the picturesque cottages of the neighboring village peep 
through; and then, on and away to the far horizon, there 
spreads out a close-wrought net-work of fenced fields, that, as 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 135 

it recedes from the eye, seems to close its meshes, as if drawn 
awry by the hand, till at length the openings can be no longer 
seen, and the hedge-rows lie piled on each other in one bosky 
mass. The geologic framework of the scene is various, and 
each distinct portion bears its own marked characteristics. In 
the foreground we have the undulating trap, so suited to remind 
one, by the picturesque abruptnesses of its outlines, of those 
somewhat fantastic backgrounds one sees in the old prints 
which illustrate, in our early English translations, the pastorals 
of Virgil and Theocritus. Next succeeds an extended plane 
of the richly-cultivated New Red Sandstone, which, occupying 
fully two-thirds of the entire landscape, forms the whole of 
what a painter would term its middle ground, and a little more. 
There rises over this plane, in the distance, a ridgy acclivity, 
much fretted by inequalities, composed of an Old Red Sand- 
stone formation, coherent enough to have resisted those denud- 
ing agencies by which the softer deposits have been worn 
down ; while the distant sea of blue hills, that se ems as if 
toppling over it, has been, scooped out of the Siluiian forma- 
tions, Upper and Lower, and demonstrates, in its commanding 
altitude and bold wavy outline, the still greater solidity of the 
materials which compose it. 

The entire prospect, — one of the finest in England, and 
eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery, — 
enabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculi- 
arity, — in some measure a defect, — in the landscapes of the 
poet Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader, 
that in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumer- 
ates than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, 
in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in which 
the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of 
vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. I cannot better 



136 F.RST IMPRESSIONS OF 

illustrate my meaning than by his introductory description to 
th& " Panegyric on Great Britain " : — 

" Heavens ! what a goodly prospect spreads around, 
Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires, 
And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all 
The stretching landscape into smoke decays ! " 

Now, the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with 
the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured 
along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least 
fifty miles in longitudinal extent ; measured laterally, from the 
spectator forwards, at least twenty. Some of the Welsh moun- 
tains which it includes are nearly thrice that distance ; but then 
they are mere remote peaks, and the area at their bases not 
included in the prospect. The real area, however, must rather 
exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles ; the fields 
into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square 
furlong in superficies ; so that each square mile must contain 
about forty, and the entire landscape, — for all is fertility, — 
about forty thousand. AVith these there are commixed innu- 
merable cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the 
surface is dimpled by unreckoned hollows ; there fretted by 
uncounted mounds ; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity, 
— a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can 
adequately express ; and so description, in even the hands of a 
master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a 
catalogue ; and all that genius can accomplish in the circum- 
stances is just to do with its catalogue what Homer did with 
his, — dip it in poetry. I found, however, that the innumerable 
details of the prospect, and its want of strong leading features, 
served to dissipate and distract the mind, and to associate with 
the vast whole an idea of littleness, somewhat in the way that 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 137 

the minute hieroglyphics on an Egyptian obelisk serve to divert 
attention from the greatness of the general mass, or the nice 
integrity of its proportions ; and I would have perhaps attributed 
the feeling to my Scotch training, had I not remembered that 
Addison, whose early prejudices must have been of an opposite 
cast, Tepresents it as thoroughly natural. Our ideas of the 
great in nature he describes as derived from vastly-extended, 
not richly-occupied, prospects. " Such," he says, " are the 
prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated 
desert of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks, and precipices, 
or a wide expanse of water. . . . Such extensive and 
undetermined prospects," he adds, " are as pleasing to the 
fancy as the speculations of eternity or infinitude are to the 
understanding." Shenstone, too, is almost equally decided on 
the point ; and certainly no writer has better claims to be heard 
on questions of this kind than the author of the Leasowes. 
" Grandeur and beauty," he remarks, "are so very opposite, that 
you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Large, 
unvariegated, simple objects have always the best pretensions 
to sublimity : a large mountain, whose sides are unvaried by 
art, is grander than one with infinite variety. Suppose it 
checkered with different-colored clumps of wood, scars of rock, 
chalk-quarries, villages, and farm-houses, — you will perhaps 
have a more beautiful scene, but much less grand, than it was 
before. The hedge-row apple-trees in Herefordshire afford a 
lovely scenery at the time they are in blossom ; but the pros- 
pect would be really grander did it consist of simple foliage. 
For the same reason, a large oak or beech in autumn is grander 
than the same in spring. The sprightly green is then obfus- 
cated ' 

12* 



138 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER VII. 

Hagley Parish Church. — The Sepulchral Marhles of the Lytteltons. — 
Epitaph on t .e Lady Lucy. — The Phrenological Doctrine of Hereditary 
Transmissioi- ; unsupported by History, save in a way in which His- 
tory can be made to support anything. — Thomas Lord Lyttelton ; his 
Moral Character a strange Contrast to thai of his Father. — The Elder 
Lyttelton ; his Death-bed. — Aberrations of the Younger Lord. — 
Strange Ghost Story ; Curious Modes of accounting for it. — Return to 
Stourbridge. — Late Drive. — Hales Owen. 

The parish church of Hagley, an antique Gothic building of 
small size, much hidden in wood, lies at the foot of the hill, 
within a few hundred yards of the mansion-house. It was 
erected in the remote past, long ere the surrounding pleasure- 
grounds had any existence ; but it has now come to be as 
thoroughly enclosed in them as the urns and obelisks of the 
rising ground above, and forms as picturesque an object as any 
urn or obelisk among them all. There is, however, a vast dif- 
ference between jest and earnest; and the bona fide tomb-stones 
of the building inscribed with names of the dead, and its dark 
walls and pointed roof reared with direct reference to a life to 
which the present is but the brief vestibule, do not quite har- 
monize with temples of Theseus and the Muses, or political 
columns erected in honor of forgotten Princes of Wales, who 
quarrelled with their fathers, and were cherished, in conse- 
quence, by the Opposition. As I came upon it unawares, and 
saw it emerge from its dense thicket of trees, I felt as if, at an 
Egyptian feast, I had unwittingly brushed off the veil from the 
idmonitc ry skeleton. The door lay open, — a few workmen 



ENG .AND AND ITS PEOPLE. 139 

were sngaged in paving a portion of the floor, and repairing 
some breaches in the vault; and as I entered, one of their 
number was employed in shovelling, some five or six feet under 
the pavement, among the dust of the Lytteltons. The trees 
outside render the place exceedingly gloomy. " At Hagley," 
the too celebrated Thomas Lord Lyttelton is made to say, in 
the posthumous volume of Letters which bears his name, 
" there is a temple of Theseus, commonly called by the gar- 
dener the temple of Perseus, which stares you in the face 
wherever you go ; while the temple of God, commonly called 
by the gardener the parish church, is so industriously hid by 
trees from without, that the pious matron can hardly read her 
Prayer-book within."^ A brown twilight still lingers in the 
place : the lettered marbles along the walls glisten cold and 
sad in the gloom, as if invested by the dun Cimmerian atmo- 
sphere described by the old poet as brooding over the land of 
the dead, — 

" the dusky coasts 
Peopled by shoals of visionary ghosts." 

One straggling ray of sunshine, colored by the stained glass of 
a narrow window, and dimmed yet more by the motty dust- 
reek raised by the workmen, fell on a small oblong tablet, the 
plainest and least considerable in the building, and, by lighting 
up its inscription of five short lines, gave to it, by one of those 

* This volume, though it contains a good many authentic anecdotes of 
the younger Lyttelton, is not genuine. It was written, shortly after his 
Lordship's death, when the public curiosity regarding him was much 
excited, by a person of resembling character, — Duke Combe, a man 
who, after dissipating in early life a large fortune, lived precariously for 
many years as a clever but rather unscrupulous author of all work, and 
succeeded in producing, when turned of seventy, a well-known volume, 
— " Dr. Syntax's Tour in Search of the Picturesque." 



140 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

fortuitous happinesses in which so much of the poetry of com- 
mon life consists, the prominence which it deserves. It briefly 
intimates that it was placed there, in its naked unadornedness, 
" at the particular desire of the Right Honorable George Lyt- 
telton, who died August 22, 1773, aged sixty-four." The poet 
had willed, like another titled poet of less unclouded reputa- 
tion, that his "epitaph should be his name alone." Beside the 
plain slab, — so near that they almost touch, — there is a mar- 
ble of great elegance, — the monument of the Lady Lucy. It 
shows that she predeceased her husband, — dying at the early 
age of twenty-nine, — nearly thirty years. Her epitaph, like 
the monody, must be familiar to most of my readers ; but for 
the especial benefit of the class whose reading may have lain 
rather among the poets of the present than of the past cen- 
tury, I give it as transcribed from the marble : — 

" Made to engage all hearts and charm all eyes, 
Though meek, magnanimous, — though witty, wise ; 
Polite as she in courts had ever been, 
Yet good as she the world had never seen ; 
The noble fire of an exalted mind, 
With gentle female tenderness combined : 
Her speech was the melodious voice of love, 
Her song the warbling of the vernal grove ; 
Her eloquence was sweeter than her song, 
Soft as her heart, and as her reason strong : 
Her form each beauty of the mind expressed ; 
Her mind was virtue by the graces dressed." 

England, in the eighteenth century, saw few better men oi 
better women than Lord Lyttelton and his lady; and it does 
seem a curious enough fact, that their only son, a boy of many 
hopes and many advantages, and who possessed quick parts 
and a vigorous intellect, should have proved, notwithstanding, 
one of *he most flagitious personages of his age. The first 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 141 

Lord Lyttelton was not more conspicuous for his genius and 
his virtues, than the second Lord Lyttelton for his talents and 
his vices. 

There are many who, though they do not subscribe to the 
creed of the phrenologist, are yet unconsciously influenced by 
its doctrines ; and never, perhaps, was the phrenological belief 
more general than now, that the human race, like some of 
the inferior races, is greatly dependent, for the development of 
what is best in it, on what I shall venture to term purity of 
breed. It has become a sort of axiom, that well-dispositioned 
intellectual parents produce a well-dispositioned intellectual 
offspring ; and of course, as human history is various enough, 
when partiallv culled, to furnish evidence in support of any- 
thing, there have been instances adduced in proof of the posi- 
tion, which it would take a long time to enumerate. But were 
exactly the opposite belief held, the same various history would 
be found to furnish at least as many evidences in support of it 
as of the other. The human race, so far at least as the mental 
and the moral are concerned, comes very doubtfully, if at all, 
under the law of the inferior natures. David Hume, better 
acquainted with history than most men, gives what seems to 
be the true state of the case. " The races of animals," he 
says, " never degenerate when carefully attended to ; and 
horses in particular always show their blood in their shape, 
spirit, and swiftness ; but a coxcomb may beget a philosopher, 
as a man of virtue may leave a worthless progeny." It is not 
uninstrnctive to observe how strongly the philosophy of the 
remark is borne out by the facts of Hume's own History. The 
mean, pusillanimous, foolish John was the son of the wise, 
dauntless Henry the Second, and the brother of the magnan- 
imous Richard Ccbut de Lion. His immediate descendant and 
successor, nearly as weak, though somewhat more honest than 



142 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

himself, was the father of the fearless, politic, unscrupulous 
Edward the First ; and he, of the imbecile Edward the Sec- 
ond ; and he, in turn, of the brave, sagacious Edward the 
Third ; and then comes one of those cases which the phrenol- 
ogist picks out from the general mass, and threads together, as 
with a string : the heroic Edward the Third was the father of 
the heroic Black Prince. And thus the record runs on, bear- 
ing from beginning to end the same character; save that as 
common men are vastly less rare, as the words imply, than 
uncommon ones, it is inevitable that instances of the ordinary 
producing the ordinary should greatly predominate over instan- 
ces of an opposite cast. We see, however, a brutal Henry the 
Eighth succeeded by his son, a just and gentle Edward the 
Sixth ; and he by his bigoted, weak-minded sister, the bloody 
Mary ; and she by his other sister, the shrewd, politic Eliza- 
beth. But in no history is this independence of man's mental 
and moral nature of the animal laws of transmission better 
shown than in the most ancient and authentic of all. The 
two first brothers the world ever saw, — children of the same 
father and mother, — were persons of diametrically opposite 
characters ; a similar diversity obtained in the families of 
Noah and of Jacob : the devout Eli was the father of profli- 
gate children ; and Solomon, the wise son of a great monarch, 
a great warrior, and a great author, — he who, according to 
Cowley, "from best of poets best of kings did grow," — had 
much unscrupulous coxcombry and mediocre commonplace 
among his brethren, and an ill-advised simpleton for his son. 

The story of the younger Lyttelton, — better known half a 
century ago than it is now, — has not a few curious points 
about it. He was one of three children, two of them girls, 
apostrophized by the berecved poet in the Monody : — 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 143 

*■ Sweet babes, "who, like the little playful fawns, 
Were wont to trip along those verdant lawns 

By your delighted mother's side, 

Who now your infant steps shall guide ? 
Ah ! where is now the hand whose tender care 
To every virtue would have formed your youth, 
And strewed with flowers the thorny ways of truta ! 

0, loss beyond repair ! 

0, wretched father, left alone 
To weep their dire misfortune and thy own ! 
How shall thy weakened mind, oppressed with woe, 

And drooping o'er thy Lucy's grave, 
Perform the duties that you doubly owe, 

Now she, alas ! is gone, 
From folly and from vice their helpless age to save ? ' ' 

One of the two female children died in infancy; the other 
iived to contract an advantageous and happy marriage with a 
very amiable nobleman, and to soothe the dying bed of her 
father. The boy gave early promise of fine parts and an 
energetic disposition. He learned almost in childhood to ap- 
preciate Milton, mastered his tasks with scarce an effort, spoke 
and wrote with fluent elegance, and was singularly happy in 
repartee. It was early seen, however, that his nature was 
based on a substratum of profound selfishness, and that an 
uneasy vanity rendered him intensely jealous of all in imme- 
diate contact with him, whose claims to admiration or respect 
he regarded as overtopping his own. All of whom he was 
jealous it was his disposition to dislike and oppose : his insane 
envy made war upon them in behalf of self; and, unfortu- 
nately, it was his excellent father, — a man possessed of one 
of the highest and most unsullied reputations of the day, — 
whom he regarded as most his rival. Had the first Lord Lyt- 
telton been a worse man, the second Lord would possibly have 
been a better one ; for in the moral and the religious, — in all 



144 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

that related to the conduct of life and the government of the 
passions, — he seemed to regard his father as a sort of reverse 
standard by which to regulate himself on a principle of contra- 
riety. The elder Lord had produced a treatise on the " Con- 
version of St. Paul," which continues to hold a prominent 
place among our works of evidence, and to which, says John- 
son, " infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious 
answer." It was answered, however, after a sort, by a scepti- 
cal foreigner, Claude Anet, whose work the younger Lyttelton 
made it his business diligently to study, and which, as a piece 
of composition and argument, he professed greatly to prefer to 
his father's. The elder Lyttelton had written verses which 
gave him a place among the British poets, and which contain, 
as he himself has characterized those of Thomson, — 

" Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, — 
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot." 

The younger Lyttelton wrote verses also ; but his, though not 
quite without merit, had to be banished society, like a leper 
freckled with infection, and they have since perished apart. 
The elder Lyttelton wrote Dialogues of the Dead ; so did the 
younger ; but his dialogues were too blasphemously profane to 
be given, in a not very zealous age, to the public ; and we can 
but predict their character from their names. The speakers in 
one were, " King David and Coesar Borgia ;" and in another, 
" Socrates and Jesus Christ." He gave a loose to his pas- 
sions, till not a woman of reputation would dare be seen in 
his company, or permit him, when he waited on her, — heir- 
apparent as he was to a* fine estate and a fair title, — to do 
more than leave his card. His father, in the hope of awaken- 
ing him to higher pursuits and a nobler ambition, exerted his 
influence in getting him returned to Parliament ; and he made 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 145 

his debut in a brilliant speech, which greatly excited the hopes 
of the veteran senator and his friends, and was complimented, 
in the House by the opposition, as fraught with the " heredi- 
tary ability of the Lytteltons. He subsequently lost his seat, 
however, in consequence of some irregularities connected with 
his election, and returned full swing to the gratification of the 
grosser propensities of his nature. At length, when shunned 
by high and low, even in the neighborhood of Hagley, he was 
sent to hide his disgrace in an obscure retreat on the continent. 
Meanwhile, the elder Lyttelton was fast breaking up. There 
was nothing in the nature of his illness, says his physician, in 
an interesting account of his last moments, to alarm the fears 
of his friends ; but there is a malady of the affections darkly 
hinted at in the narrative, which had broken his rest and pros- 
trated his strength, and which medicine could not reach. It 
is sad enough to reflect that he himself had been one of the 
best of sons. The letter is still extant which his aged father 
addressed to him, on the publication of his treatise on the 
" Conversion of St. Paul." After some judicious commenda- 
tion of the cogency of the arguments and the excellence of the 
style, the old man goes on to say, " May the King of kings, 
whose glorious cause you have so well defended, reward your 
pious labors, and grant that I may be found worthy, through 
the merits of Jesus Christ, to be an eye-witness of that happi- 
ness which I doubt not He will bountifully bestow upon you. 
In the mean time, I shall never cease glorifying God for having 
endowed you with such useful talents, and giving me so good a 
son." And here was the son, in whose behalf this affecting 
prayer had been breathed, dying broken-hearted, a victim to 
paternal solicitude and sorrow. But did the history of the 
species furnish us with no such instances, we would possess 
one argument fewer than in the existing stale of things, for a 
13 



146 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

scheme of final retribution, through which, every uniedressed 
wrong shall be righted, and every unsettled account receive its 
appropriate adjustment. Junius, a writer who never praised 
willingly, had just decided, with reference to his Lordship's 
long political career, that " the integrity and judgment of Lord 
Lyttelton were unquestionable;" but the subject of the eulogy 
was passing to the tribunal of a higher judge. His hopes of 
immortality rested solely on the revealed basis ; and yet it did 
yield him cause of gratitude on his death-bed, that he had 
been enabled throughout the probationary course, now at its 
close, to maintain the character of an honest man. " In poli 
tics and in public life," he said to his physician, shortly ere his 
departure, " I have made public good the rule of my conduct. 
I never gave counsels which I did not at the time think the 
best. I have seen that I was sometimes in the wrong ; but 1 
did not err designedly. I have endeavored in private life to do 
all the good in my power; and never for a moment could 
indulge malicious or unjust designs against any person what- 
soever." And so the first Lord Lyttelton slept with his fathers ; 
and Thomas, the second Lord, succeeded him. 

He soon attained, in his hereditary seat in the Upper House, 
to no small consequence as a Parliamentary speaker ; and the 
ministry of the day — the same that lost the colonies to Brit- 
ain — found it of importance he should be conciliated. His 
father had long desired, but never could obtain, the govern- 
ment appointment of Chief Justice in Eyre. It was known 
there was nothing to be gained by conferring a favor of the 
kind on the first Lord Lyttelton : he would have voted and 
spoken after exactly the same manner, whether he got the 
appointment or no. But the second Lord was deemed a man 
of a different stamp ; and the place which the father, after his 
honest services of forty years, had longed for in vain, the son, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 14? 

in the infancy of his peerage, ere he had performed * single 
service of any kind, received unsolicited. The gift had its 
effect ; and many of his after votes were recorded on the side 
of ministers, against Chatham and the Americans. No party, 
however, could calculate very surely on his support : he was 
frequently drawn aside by some eccentric impulse ; and fre- 
quently hit right and left in mere wantonness, without caring 
whether the stroke fell on friend or foe. There were, mean- 
while, sad doings at Hagley. In " his father's decent hall," to 
employ the language of Childe Harold, 

" condemned to uses vile, 
Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile." 

He had been married to a lady, of whom nothing worse has 
ever been said than that she accepted his hand. Her, however, 
he had early deserted. But the road he had taken, with all 
its downward ease and breadth, is not the road which leads to 
happiness ; and enough survives of his private history to show 
that he was a very miserable man. 

" And none did love him ; though to hall and bower 
He gathered revellers from far and near, 
He knew them flatterers of the festal hour, 
The heartless parasites of present cheer ; 
Yea, none did love him, — not his lemans dear." 

He seems to have been strongly marked by the peculiai 
heartlessness so generally found to coexist with the gratuitous 
and flashy generosity of men of grossly licentious lives ; that 
petrifaction of feeling to which Burns and Byron — both of 
them unfortunately but too well qualified to decide on the sub- 
ject — so pointedly refer. But he could feel remorse, however 
incapable of pity, — and remorse heightened, notwithstanding 



148 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

an ostentatious scepticism, by the direst terrors of superstition. 
Among the females who had been the objects of his temporary 
attachment, and had fallen victims to it, there was a Mrs. 
Dawson, whose fortune, with her honor and reputation, had 
been sacrificed to her passion, and who, on being deserted by 
his Lordship for another, did not long survive : she died broken- 
hearted, bankrupt both in means and character. But though 
she perished without friend, she was yet fully avenged on the 
seducer. Ever after, he believed himself haunted by her spec- 
tre. It would start up before him in the solitudes of Hagley 
at noon-day, — at night it flitted round his pillow, — it followed 
him incessantly during his rustication on the continent, — and 
is said to have given him especial disturbance when passing a 
few days at Lyons. In England, when residing for a short 
time with a brother nobleman, he burst at midnight into the 
room in which his host slept, and begged, in great horror of 
mind, to be permitted to pass the night beside him : in his own 
apartment, he said, he had been strangely annoyed by an un- 
accountable creaking of the floor. He ultimately deserted 
Hagley, which he found by much too solitary, and in too close 
proximity with the parish burying-ground ; and removed to a 
country-house near Epsom, called Pit Place, from its situation 
in an old chalk-pit. And here, six years after the death of his 
lather, the vital powers suddenly failed him, and he broke down 
and died in his thirty-sixth year. There were circumstances 
connected with his death that form the strangest part of his 
story, — circumstances which powerfully attracted public atten- 
tion at the time, and which, as they tasked too severely the 
belief of an incredulous age, have been very variously accounted 
for. We find Dr. Johnson, whose bias, however, did not 
incline him to the incredulous side, thus referring to them, in 
one o f the con "ersations recorded by Boswell. " I mentioned, ' 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 149 

says the chronicler, " Thomas Lord Lyttelton's vision, — the 
prediction of the time of his death, and its exact fulfilment." 
Johnson. — " It is the most extraordinary thing that has hap- 
pened in my day : I heard it with my own ears from his uncle, 
Lord Westcote. I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual 
world, that I am willing to believe it." Dr. Adams. — " You 
have evidence enough ; good evidence, which needs not such 
support." Johnson. — "I like to have more." 

This celebrated vision, — long so familiar to the British pub- 
lic, that almost all the writers who touch on it, from Boswell 
to Sir Walter Scott inclusive, deal by the details as too well 
known to be repeated, — is now getting pretty much out of 
sight. I shall present the particulars, therefore, as I have been 
able to collect them from the somewhat varying authorities of 
the time.* His Lordship, on Thursday, November 5th, 1779, 
had made the usual opening address to the Sovereign the occa- 
sion of a violent attack on the administration ; " but this," says 
Walpole, " was, notwithstanding his government appointment, 
nothing new to him ; he was apt to go point-blank into all 
extremes, without any parenthesis or decency, nor even boggled 
at contradicting his own words." In the evening he set out 
for his house at Epsom, carrying with him, says the same gos- 
siping authority, " a caravan of nymphs." He sat up rather 

* Walpole, "Wraxall, Warner, and the Scots Magazine. Malone, in 
one of the notes to Boswell's " Johnson," refers the reader for a correct 
account of " Lyttelton's supposed vision," to " Nash's History of "Worces- 
tershire ;" and his reference has been reprinted, without alteration, in 
the elaborate edition of Croker. But the earlier commentator must have 
been misled in the case by a deceptive memory ; and the latter, by tak- 
ing his predecessor's labors too much on trust. Nash's entire notice con 
sists of but a meagre allusion to his Lordship's death, wound up by the 
remark, that there were circumstances connected with it well suited to 
" engage the attention of believers in the second sight." 
13* 



150 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

late after his arrival; and, on retiring to bed, was suddenly 
awakened from brief slumber a little before midnight, by what 
appeared to be a dove, which, after fluttering for an instant 
near the bed-curtains, glided towards a casement-window in the 
apartment, where it seemed to flutter for an instant longer, and 
then vanished. At the same moment his eye fell upon a female 
fi&ure in white, standing- at the bed-foot, in which he at once 
recognized, says Warner, " the spectre of the unfortunate lady 
that had haunted him so long." It solemnly warned him to 
prepare for death, for that within three days he should be 
called to his final account ; and, having delivered its message, 
immediately disappeared. In the morning his Lordship seemed 
greatly discomposed, and complained of a violent headache. 
" He had had an extraordinary dream," he said, " suited, did 
he possess even a particle of superstition, to make a deep 
impression on his mind ;" and in afterwards communicating 
the particulars of the vision, he remarked, rather, however, in 
joke than earnest, that the warning was somewhat of the short- 
est, and that really, after a course of life so disorderly as his, 
three days formed but a brief period for preparation. On Sat- 
urday, he began to recover his spirits ; and told a lady of his 
acquaintance at Epsom, that as it was now the third and last 
day, he would, if he escaped for but a few hours longer, fairly 
"jockey the ghost." He became greatly depressed, however, 
as the evening wore on ; and one of his companions, as the 
critical hour of midnight approached, set forward the house- 
clock, in the hope of dissipating his fears, by misleading him 
into the belief that he had entered on the fourth day, and was 
of course safe. The hour of twelve accordingly struck ; the 
company, who had sat with him till now, broke up immedi- 
ately after, laughing at the prediction; and his Lordship 
retired to his bed-room, apparently much relieved. His valet, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 151 

who haft;, mixed up at his desire a dose of rhubarb, followed 
him a few minutes after, and he sat up in bed, in apparent 
health, to take the medicine; but, being in want of a tea- 
spoon, he despatched the servant, with an expression of impa- 
tience, to bring him one. The man was scarce a minute ab- 
sent. When he returned, however, his master was a corpse. 
He had fallen backwards on the pillow, and his outstretched 
hand still grasped his watch, which exactly indicated the fatal 
hour of twelve. It has been conjectured that his dissolution 
might have been an effect of the shock he received, on ascer- 
taining that the dreaded hour had not yet gone by: at all 
events, explain the fact as we may, ere the fourth day had 
arrived, Lyttelton was dead. It has been further related, as a 
curious coincidence, that on the night of his decease, one of his 
intimate acquaintance at Dartford, in Kent, dreamed that his 
Lordship appeared to him, and, drawing back the bed-curtains, 
said, with an air of deep melancholy, " My dear friend, it is all 
over ; you see me for the last time."^ 

* The reader may be curious to see the paragraph in which, sixty-seven 
years ago, the details of this singular incident were first communicated to 
the British public through the various periodicals of the day. I quote 
from the Scots Magazine for December 1779 : — "On Thursday night, 
November 25th, Lord Lyttelton sat up late, after the vote on the Address 
in the House of Lords. He complained of a violent headache next morn- 
ing, seemed much discomposed, and recited a very striking dream, which, 
he said, would have made a deep impression on his mind had he been 
possessed of even the least particle of superstition. He had started up 
from midnight sleep, on perceiving a bird fluttering near the bed-curtains, 
which vanished suddenly, when a female spectre, in white raiment, pre- 
sented herself, and charged him to depend on his dissolution within three 
days. He lamented jocosely the shortness of the warning; and observed, 
it was a short time for preparation after so disorderly a life. On the 
Saturday morning, he found himself in spirits; and when at Epsom, told 

Mrs. F (wife of the Hon. Mr. F ) that he should jockey the ghost 

if he escaped a few hours, for it was the third and last day. He was 



152 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

The story has been variously accounted for. Some have 
held, as we learn from Sir Walter Scott in his " Demonology," 
that his Lordship, weary of life, and fond of notoriety, first 
invented the prediction, with its accompanying circumstances, 
and then destroyed himself to fulfil it. And it is added, in a 
note furnished by a friend of Sir Walter's, that the whole inci- 
dent has been much exaggerated. "I heard Lord Fortescue 
once say," says the writer of the note, " that he was in the 
house with Lord Lyttelton at the time of the supposed visita- 
tion, and he mentioned the following circumstances as the only 
foundation for the extraordinary superstructure at which the 
world has wondered : — 'A woman of the party had one day 
lost a favorite bird, and all the men tried to recover it for her. 
Soon after, on assembling at breakfast, Lord Lyttelton com- 
plained of having passed a very bad night, and having been 
worried in his dreams by a repetition of the chase of the lady's 
bird. His death followed, as stated in the story.' " Certainly, 
had this been all, it would be scarce necessary to infer that his 
Lordship destroyed himself. But the testimony of Lord For- 
tescue does not amount to more than simply that at first Lord 
Lyttelton told but a part of his dream ; while the other evidence 
goes to show that he subsequently added the rest. Nor does 
the theory of the premeditated suicide seem particularly happy. 

seized with convulsions in the evening, and expired, putting off his clothes 
to go into bed. These circumstances are not only verified by Charles 
Wal — y, Esq., a captain in the royal navy, and many other respectable 
characters, witnesses of his Lordship's conversation and exit, but are 
remarkably impressed by the additional circumstance of a very intimate 
friend of Lord Lyttelton, at Dartford, in Kent, dreaming on the night of 
this evening (Saturday, November 27) that his Lordship had appeared to 
him towards daybreak, and, drawing back the curtain, said, ' My dear 
friend, it is aJl over; you see me for the last time,' - -or words to that 
effect." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 153 

If we mist indeed hold that the agency of the unseen world 
never sensibly mingles with that of the seen and the tangible, 

" To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee," 

we may at least deem it not very improbable that such a vision 
should have been conjured up by the dreaming fancy of an 
unhappy libertine, ill at ease in his conscience, sensible of 
sinking health, much addicted to superstitious fears, and who, 
shortly before, had been led, through a sudden and alarming 
indisposition, to think of death. Nor does it seem a thing 
beyond the bounds of credibility or coincidence, that in the 
course of the three following days, when prostrated by his ill- 
concealed terrors, he should have experienced a second and 
severer attack of the illness from which, only a few weeks 
previous, he had with difficulty recovered.^ 

* Certain it is, — and the circumstance is a curious one, — there were 
no firmer believers in the truth of the story than Lyttelton's own nearer 
relatives. It was his uncle, a man of strong sense, to whom Johnson 
referred as his authority, and on whose direct evidence he built so much; 
and we are told by Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, that the Lady Dowager Lyttel- 
ton, — the younger Lord's stepmother, whom, however, the knight repre- 
sents as " a woman of a very lively imagination," — was equally a believer. 
"I have frequently seen, at her house in Portugal Street, Grosvenor 
Square," says Sir Nathaniel, " a painting which she herself executed in 
1780, expressly to commemorate the event. It hung in a conspicuous 
part of her drawing-room. There the dove appears at the window; while 
a female figure, habited in white, stands at the bed-foot, announcing to 
Lord Lyttelton his dissolution. Every part of the picture was faithfully 
designed after the description given her by his Lordship's valet, to whom 
his master related all the circumstances." "About four years after, in 
the year 1783," adds the knight, " when dining at Pit Place, I had the 
curiosity to visit Lord Lyttelton's bed-chamber, where the casement-win- 
dow at which, as his Lordship asserted, the dove appeared to flutter, was 
pointed out to me." The reader will perhaps remember that Byron refers 
to the apparition of the bird as a precedent for the passage in the " Bride 
of Abydos ' ' in which he introduces the spirit of Selim as pouring out its 



154 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

I returned to Stourbridge, where I baited to get some 
refreshment, and wait the coach for Hales Owen, in an old- 
r ashioned inn, with its overhanging gable of mingled beam and 
brick fronting the street, and its some six or seven rooms on 
the ground-floor, opening in succession into each other like the 
rattles of a snake's tail. Three solid-looking Englishmen, two 
of them farmers evidently, the third a commercial traveller, had 
just sat down to a late dinner ; and, on the recommendation of 
the hostess, I drew in a chair and. formed one of the party. A 
fourth Englishman, much a coxcomb apparently, greatly ex- 
cited, and armed with a whip, was pacing the floor of the room 
in which we sat ; while in an outer room of somewhat inferior 
pretensions, there was another Englishman, also armed with a 
whip, and also pacing the floor; and the two, each from his 
own apartment, were prosecuting an angry and noisy dispute 
together. The outer-room Englishman was a groom, — the 
inner-room Englishman deemed himself a gentleman. They 
had both got at the races into the same gig, the property of the 
innkeeper, and quarrelled about who should drive. The groom 
had argued his claim on the plea that he was the better driver 
of the two, and that driving along a crowded race-ground was 
difficult and dangerous : the coxcomb had insisted on driving, 
because he liked to drive, and because, he said, he did n't choose 
to be driven in such a public place by a groom. The groom 
retorted, that though a groom, he was as good a man as he 
was, for all his fine coat, — perhaps a better man ; and so the 

sorrows, in the form of a nightingale, over the tomb of Zuleika. " For a 
belief that the souls of the dead inhabit birds," says the poet, " we need 
not travel to the east : Lord Lyttelton's ghost story, and many other 
instances, bring this superstition nearer home." The Lord Westcote, 
Lord Lyttelton's uncle, who related the story to Johnson, succeeded to 
the title and estate, and the present Lord Lyttelton is, I believe. Lord 
Westcote's grandson. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 155 

controversy went on, till the three solid Englishmen, worried 
at their meal by the incessant noise, interfered in behalf of the 
groom. " Thou bee'st a foolish man," said one of the farmers 
to the coxcomb ; " better to be driven by a groom than to wran- 
gle with a groom." — " Foolish man! " iterated the other farmer, 
" thou's would have broken the groom's neck and thee's own." 
— " Ashamed," exclaimed the commercial gentleman, "to be 
driven by a groom, at such a time as this, — the groom a good 
driver too, and, for all that appears, an honest man ! I don't 
think any one should be ashamed to be driven by a groom ; I 
know I would n't." — " The first un-English thing I have seen 
in England," said I : " I thought you English people were 
above littlenesses of that kind." — " Thank you, gentlemen, thank 
you," exclaimed the voice from the other room ; " I was sure I 
was right. He 's a low fellow : I would box him for sixpence." 
The coxcomb muttered something between his teeth, and 
stalked into the apartment beyond that in which we sat ; the 
commercial gentleman thrust his tongue into his cheek as he 
disappeared ; and we were left to enjoy our pudding in peace. 
It was late and long this evening ere the six o'clock coach 
started for Hales Owen. At length, a little after eight, when 
the night had fairly set in, and crowds on crowds had come 
pouring into the town from the distant race-ground, away it 
rumbled, stuck over with a double fare of passengers, jammed 
on before and behind, and occupying to the full every square 
foot atop. 

Though sorely be-elbowed and be-kneed, we had a jovial 
ride. England was merry England this evening in the neigh 
borhood of Stourbridge. We passed cart, and wagon, and 
gig, parties afoot and parties on horseback ; and there was a 
free interchange of gibe and joke, hail and halloo. There 
seemed to be more hearty mirth and less intemperance afloat 



156 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

than I have seen in Scotland on such occasions ; but the whole 
appeared just foolish enough notwithstanding ; and a knot of 
low blackguard gamblers, who were stuck together on the coach 
front, and conversing with desperate profanity on who they did 
and by whom they were done, showed me that to the foolish 
there was added not a little of the bad. The Hales Owen road 
runs for the greater part of the way within the southern edge 
of the Dudley coal-field, and, lying high, commands a down- 
ward view of its multitudinous workings for many miles. It 
presented from the coach-top this evening a greatly more mag- 
nificent prospect than by day. The dark space, — a nether 
firmament, — for its gray wasteful desolation had disappeared 
with the vanished daylight, — was spangled bright by innumer- 
able furnaces, twinkling and star-like in the distance, but flaring 
like comets in the foreground. We could hear the roaring of 
the nearer fires ; here a tall chimney or massy engine peered 
doubtfully out, in dusky umber, from amid the blackness ; 
while the heavens above glowed in the reflected light, a blood- 
red. It was near ten o'clock ere I reached the inn at Hales 
Owen ; and the room into which I was shown received, for 
more than an hour after, continual relays of guests from the 
races, who turned in for a few minutes to drink gin and water, 
and then took the road again. They were full of their back- 
ings and their bets, and animated by a life-and-death eagerness 
to demonstrate how Sir John's gelding had distanced my Lord's 
mare. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 157 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Abbotsford and the Leasowes. — The one place naturally suggestive of 
ths other. — Shenstone. — The Leasowes his most elaborate Composi- 
tion. — The English Squire and his Mill. — Hales Owen Abbey ; inter- 
esting, as the Subject of one of Shenstone's larger Poems. — The old 
anti-Popish Feeling of England well exemplified by the Fact. — Its 
Origin and History. — Decline. — Infidelity naturally favorable to the 
Resuscitation and Reproduction of Popery. — The two Naileresses. — 
Cecilia and Delia. — Skeleton Description of the Leasowes. — Poetic 
filling up. — The Spinster. — The Fountain. 

I had come to Hales Owen to visit the Leasowes, the patri- 
mony which poor Shenstone converted into an exquisite poem, 
written on the green face of nature, with groves and thickets, 
cascades and lakes, urns, temples, and hermitages, for the char- 
acters, in passing southwards, I had seen from the coach-top 
the woods of Abbotsford, with the turrets of the mansion-house 
peeping over ; and the idea of the trim-kept desolation of the 
place suggested to me that of the paradise which the poet of 
Hales Owen had, like Sir Walter, ruined himself to produce, 
that it, too, might become a melancholy desert. Nor was the 
association which linked Abbotsford to the Leasowes by any 
means arbitrary : the one place may be regarded as having in 
some degree arisen out of the other. " It had been," says Sir 
Walter, in one of his prefaces, " an early wish of mine to con- 
nect myself with my mother earth, and prosecute those experi- 
ments by which a species of creative power is exercised over 
the face of nature. I can trace, even to childhood, a pleasure 
derived from Dodsley's account of Shenstone's Leasowes ; and 

I envied the poet much more for the pleasure of accomplishing 
14 



153 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the objects detailed in his friend's sketch of his grounds, tr an for 
the possession of pipe, crook, flock, and Phillis to boot." Alas ' 

" Prudence sings to thoughtless bards in vain." 

In contemplating the course of Shenstone, Sir Walter could 
see but the pleasures of the voyage, without taking note of the 
shipwreck in which it terminated ; and so, in pursuing identi- 
cally the same track, he struck on identically the same shoal. 

I had been intimate from a very immature period with the 
writings of Shenstone. There are poets that require to be 
known early in life, if one would know them at all to advan- 
tage. They give real pleasure, but it is a pleasure which the 
mind outgrows ; they belong to the " comfit and confectionary- 
plum" class; and Shenstone is decidedly one of the number. 
No mind ever outgrew the •" Task," or the " Paradise Lost," or 
the dramas of Shakspeare, or the poems of Burns : they please 
in early youth ; and, like the nature which they embody and 
portray, they continue to please in age. But the Langhoms, 
Wartons, Kirke Whites, Shelleys, Keatses, — shall I venture 
to say it? — Byrons, are flowers of the spring, and bear to the 
sobered eye, if one misses acquainting one's self with them at 
the proper season, very much the aspect of those herbarium 
specimens of the botanist, which we may examine as matters 
of curiosity, but scarce contemplate, — as we do the fresh un- 
cropped flowers, with all their exquisite tints and delicious odors 
vital within them, — as the objects of an affectionate regard. 
Shenstone was one of the ten or twelve English poets whose 
works I had the happiness of possessing when a boy, and 
which, during some eight or ten years of my life, — foi books 
at the time formed luxuries of difficult procurement, anc I had 
to make the most of those I had, — I used to read over and over 
at the rate of about twice in the twelvemonth. And every time 
I read the poems, I was sure also to read Dodsley's appended 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 159 

description of the Leasowes. I could never form from it any 
idea of the place as a whole : the imagery seemed broken up 
into detached slips, like the imagery of a magic lantern ; but 
then nothing could be finer than the insulated slips ; and my 
mind was filled with gorgeous pictures, all fresh and bright, of 
" sloping groves," " tufted knolls," " wooded valleys," " seques- 
tered lakes," and "noisy rivulets," — of rich grassy lawns, and 
cascades that come bursting in foam from bosky hill-sides, — 
of monumental urns, tablets, and temples, — of hermitages and 
priories ; and I had now come to see in what degree my con- 
ceptions, drawn from the description, corresponded with the 
original, if, indeed, the original still maintained the impress 
given it by the genius of Shenstone. His writings, like almost 
all poetic writings that do not please equally at sixteen and 
sixty, had stood their testing century but indifferently well. No 
one at least would now venture to speak of him as the " cele- 
brated poet, whose divine elegies do honor to our nation, our 
language, and our species;" though such, sixty years ago, was 
the estimate of Burns, when engaged in writing his preface to 
an uncouth volume of poems first published at Kilmarnock, 
that promise to get over their century with much greater ease. 
On the "Leasowes," — by far the most elaborate of all the 
compositions of its author, — the ingenious thinking of full 
twenty years had been condensed ; and I was eager to ascertain 
whether it had not stood its testing century better, under the 
skyey influences, than " Ophelia's Urn," or " the Song of Colin, 
a discerning Shepherd," under those corresponding influences 
of the literary heavens which freshen and preserve whatever 
has life in it, and wear down and dilapidate whatever is dead. 
A little after ten o'clock, a gentleman, who travelled in his 
own carriage, entered the inn, — a frank, genial Englishman, 
who seemed to have a kind word for every one, and whom the 



160 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

inn-people addressed as the Squire. My Scotch tongue revealed 
my country ; and a few questions on the part of the Squire, 
about Scotland and Scotch matters, fairly launched us into con- 
versation. I had come to llales Owen to see the Leasowes, ] 
said : when a very young man, I used to dream about them full 
five hundred miles away, among the rocks and hills of the wild 
north ; and I had now availed myself of my first opportunity 
of paying them a visit. The Squire, as he in turn informed 
me ; had taken the inn in his way to rusticate for a few days at 
a small property of his in the immediate neighborhood of the 
Leasowes : and if I but called on him on the morrow at his 
temporary dwelling, — Squire Eyland's Mill, — all the better if 
[ came to breakfast, — he would, he said, fairly enter me on the 
grounds, and introduce me, as we went, to the old ecclesiastical 
building which forms the subject of one of Shenstone's larger 
poems, " The Ruined Abbey." He knew all the localities, — 
which one acquainted with but the old classic descriptions 
would now find it difficult to realize, for the place had fallen 
into a state of sad dilapidation ; and often acted the part of 
cicerone to his friends. I had never met with anything half so 
frank in Scotland from the class who travel in their own car- 
riages ; and, waiving but the breakfast, I was next morning at 
the Mill, — a quiet, rustic dwelling, at the side of a green lane, 
. — a little before ten. It lies at the bottom of a flat valley, with 
a small stream, lined by many a rich meadow, stealing between 
its fringes of willows and alders ; and with the Leasowes on 
the one hand, and the Clent Hills, little more than an hour's 
walk away, on the other, it must form, in the season of green 
fields and clear skies, a delightful retreat. 

The Squire led me through the valley adown the course of 
the stream for nearly a mile, and then holding to the right for 
nearly a quarter of a mile more, we came full upon the ruins 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 161 

of Hales Owen Abbey. The mace of the bluff Harry had fallen 
heavy upon the pile : it had proved, in after times, a convenient 
quarry for the neighboring farm-houses, and the repair of roads 
and fences for miles around ; and so it now consists of but a 
few picturesque fragments cut apart by wide gaps, in which we 
fail to trace even the foundations, — fragments that rise insu- 
lated and tall, — here wrapt up in ivy, — there bristling with 
wall-flower, — over hay-ricks and antique farm-offices, and 
moss-grown fruit-trees, and all those nameless appurtenances 
which a Dutchman would delight to paint, of a long-established 
barn-yard, farm-house, and orchard. I saw, resting against 
one of the walls, the rudely-carved lid of a stone coffin, which 
exhibits in a lower corner a squat figure in the attitude of 
adoration ; and along the opposite side and upper corner, an 
uncouth representation of the crucifixion, in which the figure 
on the cross seems that of a gaunt ill-proportioned skeleton. 
Covered over, however, with the lichens of ages, and garnished 
with a light border of ground ivy, — a plant which greatly 
abounds amid the ruins, — its antique misproportions seem 
quite truthful enough, and impress more than elegance. One 
tall gable, that of the chancel, which forms the loftiest part of 
the pile, still remains nearly entire ; and its great window, once 
emblazoned with the arms of old Judge Lyttelton, but now 
stripped of stained glass and carved mullion, is richly festooned 
with ivy. A wooden pigeon-house has been stuck up in the 
opening, and half a dozen white pigeons were fluttering in the 
sunshine this morning, round the ivied gable-top. The dust of 
the old learned lawyer lies under the hay-ricks below, with that 
of nameless warriors and forgotten churchmen : and when the 
spade turns up the soil, fragments of human bones are found, 
thickly mingled with bits of painted tiles and stained glass. 
It may be thought I am but wasting words in describing so 
14* 



162 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

broken a ruin, seeing I must have passed many finer ones 
undescribed; but it will, 1 trust, be taken into account that I 
had perused the "Ruined Abbey" at least twice every twelve- 
month, from my twelfth to my twentieth year, and that I had 
now before me the original of the picture. The poem is not a 
particularly fine one, Shenstone's thinking required rhyme, 
just as Pope's weikly person needed stays, to keep it tolerably 
erect ; and the " Ruined Abbey " is in blank verse. There is 
poetry, however, in some of the conceptions, such as that of 
the peasant, in the days of John, returning listless from his 
fields after the Pope had pronounced his dire anathema, and 
seeing in every dark overbellying cloud 

" A vengeful angel, in ■whose waving scroll 
He read damnation." 

Nor is the following passage, — descriptive of the same gloomy 
season of terror and deprivation, — though perhaps inferior in 
?legance and effect to the parallel passage in the prose of 
Htf le, without merit : — 

" The wretch, — whose hope, by stern oppression chased 
From every earthly bliss, still as it saw 
Triumphant wrong, took wing and flew to heaven, 
And rested there, — now mourned his refuge lost, 
And wonted peace. The sacred fane was barred ; 
And the lone altar, where the mourners thronged 
To supplicate remission, smoked no more ; 
While the green weed luxuriant rose around. 
Some from their deathbed, in delirious woe, 
Beheld the ghastly king approach, begirt 
In tenfold terrors, or, expiring, heard 
The last loud clarion sound, and Heaven's decree 
With unremitting vengeance bar the skies. 
Nor light the grief, — by Superstition weighed, — 
That their dishonored corse, shut from the verge 
Of hallowed earth or tutelary fane, 
Must sleep with brutes, their vassals, in the field, 
Beneath some path in marie unexercised." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 163 

The chief interest of the poem, however, does not lie in its 
p:etry. It forms one of the most curious illustrations I know 
of the strong anti-Popish zeal, apart from religious feeling, 
which was so general in England during the last century, and 
which, in the Lord-George-Gordon mobs, showed itself so very 
formidable a principle when fairly aroused. Dickens' picture, 
in " Barnaby Rudge," of the riots of 17S0, has the merit of 
being faithful ; — his religious mobs are chiefly remarkable for 
being mobs in which there is no religion; but his picture would 
be more faithful still, had he made them in a slight degree Prot- 
estant. Shenstone, like the Lord-George-Gordon mob, was 
palpably devoid of religion, — " an elegant heathen, rather than 
a Christian," whose poetry contains verses in praise of almost 
every god except the true one ; and who, when peopling his 
Elysium with half the deities of Olympus, saw nymphs and 
satyrs in his very dreams. But though only an indifferent 
Christian, he was an excellent Protestant. There are passages 
in the "Ruined Abbey" that breathe the very spirit of the 
English soldiery, whose anti-Popish huzzas, on the eve of the 
Revolution, deafened their infatuated monarch in his tent. 
Take, for instance, the following : — 

"Hard was our fate while Rome's director taught 
Of subjects born to be their monarch's prey ; 
To toil for monks, — for gluttony to toil, — 
For vacant gluttony, extortion, fraud, 
For avarice, envy, pride, revenge, and shame ! 
0, doctrine breathed from Stygian caves ! exhaled 
From inmost Erebus ! " 

Not less decided is the passage in which he triumphs over the 
suppression of the Monasteries, " by Tudor's wild caprice." 

" Then from its towering height, with horrid sound, 
Rushed the proud Abbey. Then the vaulted roofs, 
-orn from their walls, disclosed the wanton scene 



164 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Of monkish chastity ! Each angry friar 
Crawled from his bedded strumpet, muttering low 
An ineffectual curse. The pervious nooks, 
That ages past conveyed the guileful priest 
To play some image on the gaping crowd, 
Imbibe the novel daylight, and expose 
Obvious the fraudful engin'ry of Rome." 

Even with, all his fine taste, and high appreciation, for the pur- 
poses of the landscape-gardener, otbonajide pieces of antiquity, 
rich in association, it is questionable, from the following passage, 
whether his anti-Popish antipathies would not have led him to 
join our Scotch iconoclasts in their stern work of dilapidation. 

" Henceforth was plied the long-continued task 
Of righteous havoc, covering distant fields 
With the wrought remnants of the shattered pile ; 
Till recent, through the land, the pilgrim sees 
Kich tracts of brighter green, and in the midst 
Gray mouldering walls, with nodding ivy crowned, 
Or Gothic turret, pride of ancient days, 
Now but of use to grace a rural scene, 
To bound our vistas, and to glad the sons 
Of George's reign, reserved for fairer times." 

In " The Schoolmistress," the most finished and pleasing of 
Shenstone's longer poems, we find one of the sources of the 
feeling somewhat unwittingly exhibited. " Shenstone learned 
to read," says Johnson, in his biography, " of an old dame, 
whom his poem of 'The Schoolmistress' has delivered to pos- 
terity." " The house of my old schooldame Sarah Lloyd," we 
find the poet himself saying, in one of his earlier letters (1741), 
" is to be seen as thou travellest towards the native home of 
thy faithful servant. But she sleeps with her fathers, and is 
buried with her fathers ; and Thomas her son reigneth in her 
stead." Of the good Sarah Lloyd we learn from the poem, — 
t piece of ' riformatio: l suited to show how shrewd a part Pusey- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 165 

ism is acting in possessing itself of the humbler schools of the 
country, — that 

'■' She was just, and friend to virtuous lore, 
And passed much time in truly virtuous deed, 
And in her elfins' ears would oft deplore 
The times when truth by Popish rage did bleed, 
And tort'rous death was true devotion's meed, 
And simple Faith in iron chains did mourn, 
That nould on wooden image place her creed, 
And lawny saints in smouldering flames did burn : 
0, dearest Lord, forfend thilk days should e'er return ! " 

The anti-Popish feeling of England, which existed, as in 
Shenstone, almost wholly apart from doctrinal considerations 
seems to have experienced no diminution till after the suppres- 
sion of the rebellion of 1745. A long series of historic events 
had served first to originate, and then to fill with it to satura- 
tion every recess of the popular mind. The horrors of the 
Marian persecution, rendered patent to all by the popular narra- 
tives of Fox, — the Invincible Armada and its thumb-screws. 
— the diabolical plot of the time of James, — the Irish Massa- 
cre of the following reign, — the fierce atrocities of Jeffries in 
the Monmouth rising, intimately associated, in the Protestant 
mind of the country, with the Popery of his master, — the im- 
prisonment of the bishops, — and the influence of the anti- 
Romish teaching of the English Church after the Revolution, 
with the dread, for many years, of a Popish Pretender, — had 
all united to originate and develop the sentiment which, in its 
abstract character, we find so adequately represented in Shen- 
stone. Much about the time of the poet's death, howevei, a 
decided reaction began to take place. The Pretender died; 
the whigs originated their scheme of Roman Catholic Ema 
cipation: afheistic violence had been let loose on the clergy of 
France, not in their character as Popish, but in their character 



166 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

as Christian ; and both the genius of Burke and the piety of 
Hall had appealed to the Protestant sympathies of England in 
their behalf. The singularly anomalous position and palpable 
inefficiency of the Irish Establishment had created a very gen- 
eral diversion in favor of the Popish majority of Ireland ; the 
Voluntary controversy united Evangelistic Dissent and Koman 
Catholicism by the bonds of a common cause, — at least Evan- 
gelistic Dissent was fond enough to believe the cause a com- 
mon one, and learned to speak with respect and regard of 
"Koman Catholic brethren;" the spread of Puseyism in the 
English Establishment united, by sympathies of a different but 
not weaker kind, the Papist and the High Churchman ; the old 
anti-Popish feeling has been gradually sinking under the influ- 
ence of so many reactive causes ; and not since the times of 
the Reformation was it at so low an ebb as in England at the 
present day. It would seem as if every old score was to be 
blotted off, and Popery to be taken a second time on trial. But 
it will ultimately be found wanting, and will, as in France and 
Germany, have just to be condemned again. The stiff rigidity 
of its unalterable codes of practice and belief, — inadequately 
compensated by the flexibility of its wilier votaries, — has inca- 
pacitated it from keeping up with the human mind in its on- 
ward march. If it be the sure destiny of man to rise, it must 
be the as inevitable fate of Popery to sink. The excesses of 
fifteen hundred years have vitiated and undermined its consti- 
tution, intellectual and moral ; its absurder beliefs have become 
incompatible with advanced knowledge, — its more despotic 
assumptions with rational freedom ; and were it not for the 
craving vacuum in the public mind which infidelity is continu- 
ally creating for superstition to fill, and into which Popery is 
fitfully rushing, like steam into the condenser of an engine, 
again and again to be annihilated, and again and again to flow 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 167 

in, its day, in at least the more enlightened pjitions of the 
empire, would not be long. 

There seems to be a considerable resemblance at bottom 
between the old English feeling exemplified in Shenstone, and 
that which at present animates the Ronge movement in Ger- 
manv. We find the English poet exclaiming, 

" Hail, honored "Wickliffe, enterprising sage ! 
An Epicurus in the cause of truth ! ! " 

And the continental priest, — occupying at best but a half-way 
position between Luther and Voltaire, and who can remark in 
his preachings that " if Roman Catholics have a Pope at Rome, 
the Protestants have made their Pope of a book, and that that 
book is but a dead letter," — apostrophizes in a similar spirit 
the old German reformers. I can, however, see nothing incon- 
sistent in the zeal of such men. It does not greatly require 
the aid of religion to enable one to decide that exhibitions such 
as that of the holy coat of Treves are dishonest and absurd, or 
to warm with indignation at the intolerance that would make 
one's liberty or life pay the penalty of one's freedom of opinion. 
Shenstone, notwithstanding his indifference to the theological, 
was quite religious enough to have been sabred or shot, had he 
been at Paris on the eve of St. Bartholomew, or knocked on 
the head if in Ulster at the time of the Irish massacre. What, 
apart from religious considerations, is chiefly to be censured 
and regretted in the zeal of the Ronges and Shenstones, Mich- 
elets and Eugene Sues, is, not that it is inconsistent, but that 
it constitutes at best but a vacuum-creating power. It forms a 
void where, in the nature of things, no void can permanently 
exist, and which superstition is ever rushing in ta fill ; and so 
the progress of the race, wherever it is influentially operative, 
instead of being conducted onwards in its proper line cf mgrch, 



168 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

becomes a weary cycle, that ever returns upon itself. The, 
human intellect, under its influence, seems as if drawn within 
the ceaselessly-revolving eddies of a giddy maelstrom, or as if it 
had become obnoxious to the remarkable curse pronounced of 
old by the Psalmist : I quote from the version of Milton, 

" My God ! oh, make them as a wheel ; 
No quiet let them find ; 
Giddy and restless let them reel 
Like stubble from the -wind." 

History is emphatic on the point. Nearly three centuries have 
elapsed since the revived Christianity of the Reformation sup- 
planted Roman Catholicism in Scotland. But there was no 
vacuum created ; the space previously taken up in the popular 
mind by the abrogated superstition was amply occupied by the 
resuscitated faith ; and, as a direct consequence, whatever reac- 
tion in favor of Popery may have taken place among the people 
is of a purely political, not religious character. With Popery 
as a religion the Presbyterian Scotch are as far from closing 
now as they ever were. But how entirely different has been 
the state of matters in France ! There are men still living 
who remember the death of Voltaire. In the course of a single 
lifetime, Popery has been twice popular and influential in that 
country, and twice has the vacuum-creating power, more than 
equally popular and influential for the time, closed chill and 
cold around it, to induce its annihilation. The literature of 
France for the last half-century is curiously illustrative of this 
process of action and reaction, — of condensation and expan 
sion. It exhibits during that period three distinct gr< ups of 
authors. There is first a group of vacuum-creators, — a sur- 
viving remnant of the Encyclopedists of the previous hvf-cen- 
tury — adequately represented by Condorcet and the Abbe 
Ray ial ; next appears a group of the reactionists, repre ented 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 169 

equally well by Chateaubriand and Lamartine ; a/id then — for 
Popery has again become monstrous, — we see a second group 
of vacuum-creators in the Eugene Sues and Michelets, the most 
popular French writers of the present day. And thus must the 
cycle revolve, " unquiet and giddy as a wheel," until France 
shall find rest in the Christianity of the New Testament. 

I spent so much time among the ruins, that my courteous 
conductor the Squire, who had business elsewhere to attend to, 
had to leave me, after first, however, setting me on my way to 
the Leasowes, and kindly requesting me to make use of his 
name, if the person who farmed the grounds demurred, as 
sometimes happened with strangers, to give me admission to 
them. I struck up the hill, crossed a canal that runs along its 
side, got into a cross road between sheltered belts of planting, 
and then, with the Leasowes full in front, stopped at a small 
nailery, to ask at what point I might most easily gain access to 
them. The sole workers in the nailery were two fresh-colored, 
good-looking young girls, whose agile, well-turned arms were 
plying the hammer with a rapidity that almost eluded the eye, 
and sent the quick glancing sparks around them in showers. 
Both stopped short in their work, and came to the door to point 
out what they deemed the most accessible track. There was 
no gate, they said, in this direction, but I would find many gaps 
in the fence : they were in doubt, however, whether the people 
at the " white house " would give me leave to walk over the 
grounds : certainly the nailer lads were frequently refused ; 
and they were sorry they could n't do anything for me : I would 
be sure of permission if they could give it me. At all events, 
said I, I shall take the longest possible road to the white house, 
and see a good deal of the grounds ere I meet with the refusal. 
Both the naileresses laughea , and one of them said she had 
always heard the Scotch were " long-headed." Hales Owen 
15 



170 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and its precincts are included in the great iron district ( Bir- 
mingham ; and the special branch of the iron trade whicfc falls 
to the share of the people is the manufacture of nails. The 
suburbs of the town are formed chiefly of rows of little brick- 
houses, with a nail-shop in each; and the quick, smart patter 
of hammers sounds incessantly, in one encircling girdle of din, 
from early morning till late night. As I passed through, on 
my way to the Squire's Mill, I saw whole families at work 
together, — father, mother, sons, and daughters; and met in 
streets young girls, not at all untidily dressed considering the 
character of their vocation, trundling barrowfuls of coal to their 
r orges, or carrying on their shoulders bundles of rod-iron. Of 
-»11 our poets of the last century, there was scarce one so 
addicted to the use of those classic nicknames which impart so 
unreal an air to English poetry, when bestowed on English 
men and women, as poor Shenstone. We find his verses 
dusted over with Delias, and Cecilias, and Ophelias, Flavias, 
and Fulvias, Chloes, Daphnes, and Phillises; and, as if to give 
them the necessary prominence, the printer, in all the older edi- 
tions, has relieved them from the surrounding text by the em- 
ployment of staring capitals. I had read Shenstone early 
enough to wonder what sort of looking people his Delias and 
Cecilias were ; and now, ere plunging into the richly-wooded 
Leasowes, I had got hold of the right idea. The two young 
naileresses were really very pretty. Cecilia, a ruddy blonde, 
was fabricating tackets ; and Delia, a bright-eyed brunette, 
engaged in heading a double-double. 

Ere entering on the grounds, however, I must attempt doing 
what Dodsley has failed to do, — I must try whether I cannot 
give the reader some idea of the Leasowes as a whole, in theii 
relation to the surrounding country. Let us, then, once more 
return to the three Silurian eminences that rise island-like from 



ENGLAND AND ITS PE )PLE. 171 

the basin of the Dudley coal-field, and the parallel line of trap 
hills that stretches away amid the New Red Sandstone. I 
have described the lines as parallel, but, like the outstretched 
sides of a parallel-ruler, not opposite. There joins on, howi 
to the Silurian line, — like a prolongation of one of the right 
lines of the mathematician indicated by dots, — an extension of 
the chain, not Silurian, which consists of eminences of a flatter 
and humbler character than either the Wren's Nest or the 
Castle Hill, and which runs opposite to the trap chain for sev- 
eral miles. One of these supplementary eminences — the one 
adjoining the Castle Hill — is composed of the trap to which 
the entire line owes its elevation ; and a tall, cairn-like group 
of apparent boulders, that seem as if they had been piled up by 
giants, but are mere components of a partially disintegrated 
projection from the rock below, occupies its summit. In the 
flat hill directly beyond it, though the trap does not appear, it 
has tilted up the Lower Coal Measures, amid the surrounding 
New Red Sandstone, saddlewise on its back; the strata shelve 
downwards on both sides from the anticlinal line atop, like the 
opposite sides of a roof from the ridge ; and the entire hill, to 
use a still humbler illustration, resembles a huge blister in new 
plaster, formed by the expansion of some fragment of unslaked 
lime in the ground -coating beneath. Now, it is with this hill 
of the Lower Coal Measures — this huge blister of millstone 
grit — that we have chiefly to do. 

Let the reader imagine it of soft swelling outline, and ample 
base, with the singularly picturesque trap range full in front, 
some four miles away, and a fair rural valley lying between. 
Let him further imagine the side of the hill furrowed by a 
transverse valley, opening at right angles into the great front 
valley, and separating atop into two forks, or branches, that run 
up, shallowing as they go, to near the hill-top. Let him, in 



172 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

short, imagine txs great valley a broad right line, and tne 
transverse forked valley a gigantic letter Y resting on it. And 
this forked valley on the hill-side — this gigantic letter Y — 
is the Leasowes. The picturesqueness of such a position can 
be easily appreciated. The forked valley, from head to gorge, 
is a reclining valley, partaking along its bottom of the slope of 
the eminence on which it lies, and thus possessing, what is by 
no means common among the valleys of England, true down- 
hill water-courses, along which the gathered waters may leap 
in a chain of cascades ; and commanding, in its upper recesses, 
though embraced and sheltered on every side by the surround- 
ing hill, extended prospects of the country below. It thus com- 
bines the scenic advantages of both hollow and rising ground, 
— the quiet seclusion of the one, and the expansive landscapes 
of the other. The broad valley into which it opens is rich and 
well wooded. Just in front of the opening we see a fine sheet 
of water, about twenty acres in extent, the work of the monks ; 
immediately to the right stand the ruins of the abbey ; imme- 
diately to the left, the pretty compact town of Hales Owen lies 
grouped around its fine old church and spire ; a range of green 
swelling eminences rises beyond ; beyond these, fainter in the 
distance, and considerably bolder in outline, ascends the loftier 
range of the trap hills, — one of the number roughened by the 
tufted woods, and crowned by the obelisk at Hagley ; and, pver 
all, blue and shadowy on the far horizon, sweeps the undulat- 
ing line of the mountains of Cambria. Such is the character 
.of the grounds which poor Shenstone set himself to convert into 
an earthly paradise, and such the outline of the surrounding 
landscape. But to my hard anatomy of the scene I must add 
the poet's own e] 3gant filling up : — 

" Romantic scenes of pendent hills, 
And verdant vales and falling rills, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 173 

And mossy banks the fields adorn, 

Where Damon, simple swain, was born. 

The Dryads reared a shady grove, 

Where such as think, and such as love, 

Might safely sigh their summer's day, 

Or muse their silent hours away. 

The Oreads liked the climate well, 

And taught the level plains to swell 

In verdant mounds, from whence the eye 

Might all their larger works descry. 

The Naiads poured their urns around 

From nodding rocks o'er vales profound; 

They formed their streams to please the view, 

And bade them wind as serpents do ; 

And having shown them where to stray, 

Threw little pebbles in their way." 

I got ready permission at the house of the Leasowes — a 
modern building erected on the site of that in which Shenstone 
resided — to walk over the grounds; and striking upwards 
directly along the centre of the angular tongue of land which 
divides the two forks of the valley, I gained the top of the hill, 
purposing to descend to where the gorge opens below along the 
one fork, and to re ascend along the other. On the hill-top, a 
single field's breadth beyond the precincts of the Leasowes, I 
met a tall middle-aged female, whose complexion, much em- 
browned by the sun, betrayed the frequent worker in fields, and 
her stiff angularity of figure, the state of single blessedness, and 
"maiden meditation, fancy free," which Shakspeare compli- 
mented in Elizabeth. I greeted her with fair good day, and 
asked her whether the very fine grounds below were not the 
Leasowes ? or, as I now learned to pronounce the word, Lisos, 
— for when I gave it its long Scotch sound, no one in the 
neighborhood seemed to know what place I meant. " Ah, yes," 
said she, " the Lisos ! — they were much thought of long ago, 
in Squire Shenstone's days; but they are all ruinated now; 
15* 



174 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and, except on Sundays, when the nailer lads get into them, 
when they can, few people come their way. Squire Shenstone 
was a poet," she added, " and died for love." This was not 
quite the case : the Squire, who might have married his Phillis 
had he not been afraid to incur the expense of a wife, died of 
a putrid fever at the sober age of forty-nine ; but there would 
have been little wit in substituting a worse for a better story, 
and so I received without challenge the information of the 
spinster. In descending, I took the right-hand branch of the 
valley, which is considerably more extended than that to the 
left. A low cliff, composed of the yellow gritty sandstone of 
the Lower Coal Measures, and much overhung by stunted alder 
and hazel bushes, stands near the head of the ravine, just where 
the Leasowes begin ; and directly out of the middle of the cliff, 
some three or four feet from its base, there comes leaping to 
the light, as out of the smitten rock in the wilderness, a clear 
and copious spring, — one of the " health-bestowing " fountains, 

" All bordered with moss, 
"Where the harebells and violets grew." 

Alas ! moss, and harebells, and violets, were gone, with the 
path which had once led to the spot, and the seat which had 
once fronted it ; the waters fell dead and dull into a quagmire, 
like young human life leaping out of unconscious darkness into 
misery, and then stole away through a boggy strip of rank grass 
and lushes, along a line of scraggy alders. All was changed, 
sa \re the full-volumed spring, and it, — 

" A thousand and a thousand years, 
'Twill flow as now it flows." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 175 



CHAPTER IX. 

Detour. — The Leasowes deteriorated wherever the Poet had built, and 
improrsd wherever he had planted. — View from the Hanging Wood. 
— Strar.agem of the Island Screen. — Virgil's Grave. — Mound of the 
Hales Owen and Birmingham Canal ; its sad Interference with Shen- 
stone's Poetic Description of the Infancy of the Stour. — Vanished 
Cascade and Root-house. — Somerville's Urn. — " To all Friends round 
the Wrekin." — River Scenery of the Leasowes ; their great Variety. — 
Peculiar Arts of the Poet ; his Vistas, when seen from the wrong end, 
Realizations of Hogarth's Caricature. — Shenstone the greatest of Land- 
scape Gardeners. — Estimate of Johnson. — Goldsmith's History of the 
Leasowes ; their after History. 

The water creeps downwards from where it leaps from the 
rock, to form a chain of artificial lakes, with which the bottom 
of the dell is occupied, and which are threaded by the water- 
course, like a necklace of birds' eggs strung upon a cord. Ere 
I struck down on the upper lake, however, I had to make a 
detour of a few hundred yards to the right, to see what Dodsley 
describes as one of the finest scenes furnished by the Leasowes, 
— a steep terrace, commanding a noble prospect, — a hanging 
wood, — an undulating pathway over uneven ground, that rises 
and falls like a snake in motion, — a monumental tablet, — 
three rustic seats, — and a temple dedicated to Pan. . The 
happy corner which the poet had thus stuck over with so much 
bravery is naturally a very pretty one. The hill-side, so gentle 
in most of its slopes, descends for about eighty feet, — nearly at 
right angles with the forked valley, and nearly parallel to the 
great valley in front, — as if it were a giant wave on the eve 
of breaking; and it is on this steep rampart-like declivity, — 



176 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

this giant wave, — that the hanging wood was planted, the 
undtflaing path formed, and the seats and temple erected. 
But all save the wood has either wholly vanished, or left behind 
but "he faintest traces, — traces so faint that, save for the plan 
of the grounds appended to the second edition of Dodsley's 
description, they would have told me no distinct story. 

Ere descending the rampart-like acclivity, but just as the 
ground begins gradually to rise, and when I should be passing, 
according to Dodsley, through the " Lover's Walk," a seques- 
tered arboraceous lane, saddened by the urn of "poor Miss 
Dolman," — " by the side of which" there had flowed " a small 
bubbling rill, forming little peninsulas, rolling over pebbles, or 
falling down small cascades, all under cover, and taught to 
murmur very agreeably," — 1 found myself in a wild tangled 
jungle, with no path under foot, with the "bubbling rill" con- 
verted into a black, lazy swamp, with thickets of bramble all 
around, through which I had to press my way, as I best could, 
breast-high, — "poor Miss Dolman's" urn as fairly departed 
and invisible as " poor Miss Dolman ;" in short, everything 
that had been done undone, and all in readiness for some 
second Shenstone to begin de novo. As the way steepened, 
and the rank aquatic vegetation of the swamp, once a runnel, 
gave place to plants that affect a drier habitat, I could detect 
in the hollow of the hill some traces of the old path ; but the 
place forms a receptacle into which the gusty winter winds 
sweep the shorn leafage of the hanging wood above, and so 1 
had to stalk along the once trimly-kept walk, through a stra- 
tum of decayed leaves, half-leg deep. In the middle of the 
hanging wood I found what had been once the temple of Pan. 
There is a levelled space on the declivity, about half the size 
of an ordinary sitting parlor: the winds had swept it bare; 
and there, distinctly visible on three sides of the area, are the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 177 

fouil ations of a thin brick wall, that, where least broken, rises 
some s : x or eight inches above the level. A little further on, 
where the wood opens on one of the loveliest prospects I ever 
beheld, I found a decayed oak-post remaining", to indicate the 
locale of a seat that had once eulogized the landscape which it 
fronted in a classic Latin inscription. But both seat and in- 
scription are gone. And yet, maugre this desolation, not in 
the days of Shenstone did the Leasowes look so nobly fiom 
this elevation as they did this day. I was forcibly reminded 
of one of the poet's own remarks, and the completeness of its 
realization : " The works of a person that builds," he says, 
" begin immediately to decay ; while those of him who plants 
begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more 
lasting pleasure than building." The trees of the Leasowes, 
when the Leasowes formed the home and furnished the em- 
ployment of the poet, seem to have been mere saplings. "We 
find him thus writing to a friend in the summer of 1743 : — 
"A malignant caterpillar has demolished the beauty of all our 
large oaks. Mine are secured by their littleness. But I guess 
Hagley Park suffers, — a large wood near me being a winter- 
piece for nakedness." More than a hundred years have since 
elapsed, and the saplings of a century ago have expanded into 
the dignity of full-grown treehood. The hanging wood, com- 
posed chiefly of very noble beeches, with a sprinkling of grace- 
ful birches on its nether skirt, raises its crest so high as fully to 
double the height of the eminence which it crowns ; while the 
oaks on the finely varied ground below, of imposing size, and 
exhibiting in their grouping the hand of the master, compose 
such a scene as the finest of the landscapes designed by Mar- 
tin in illustration of Milton's " Paradise Lost." The day was 
warm, calm, cloudhss; the lights and shadows lay clear and 
transparent on lake and stream, dell and dingle, green swelling 



178 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

lawn and tall fcrsst tree; and the hanging wood, and the 
mossy escarpment over which it hangs, were as musical in the 
bright sunshine, adth the murmur of bees, as when, exactly 
a hundred and two years before, Shenstone was penning his 
pastoral ballad. 

Quitting the hanging wood, I struck athwart the declivity, 
direct on the uppermost lake in the chain which I have de- 
scribed as lying, like a string of birds' eggs, along the bottom 
of the valley. I found it of small extent, — a pond or lochan, 
rather than a lake, — darkly colored, — its still, black surface 
partially embroidered by floats of aquatic plants, among which 
I could detect the broad leaves of the water-lily, though the 
flowers were gone, — and overhung on all sides by careless 
groups of trees, that here and there dip their branches in the 
water. In one striking feature of the place we may still detect 
the skill of the artist. There is a little island in the upper 
part of the lake, by much too small and too near the shore to 
have any particular interest as such ; or, indeed, viewed from 
below, to seem an island at all. It is covered by a thick clump 
of alders of low growth, just tall enough and thick enough to 
conceal, screen-like, the steep bank of the lake behind. The 
top of the bank is occupied by several lofty oaks ; and as the 
screen of alders hides the elevation on which they stand, they 
seem to rise direct from the level of the water to the giant 
stature of a hundred feet. The giants of the theatre are made 
by setting one man on the shoulders of another, and then throw- 
ing over both a large cloak ; — the giant trees here are made 
by setting them upon the shoulders of a hill, and making the 
thick island-screen serve the purpose of the concealing mantle. 

The second lake in the chain — a gloomier and smaller piece 
of water than the first, and much hidden in wood — has in its 
present state no beauty to recommend it : it is just such an 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 179 

inky pool, with rotten snags projecting from its sluggisn sur- 
face, as a murderer would select for concealing the body of his 
victim. A forlorn brick ruin, overflooded by the neighboring 
streamlet, and capped with sickly ivy, stands at the upper end ; 
at the lower, the waters escape by a noisy cascade into a 
secluded swampy hollow, overshadowed by stately oaks and 
ashes, much intermixed by trees of a lower growth, — yew, 
holly, and hazel, — and much festooned with ivy. We find 
traces of an untrodden pathway on both sides the stream, with 
the remains of a small, mouldering, one-arched bridge, now 
never crossed over, and divested of both its parapets ; and in 
the centre of a circular area, surrounded by trees of loftiest 
stature, we may see about twice as many bricks as an Irish 
laborer would trundle in a wheel-barrow, arranged in the form 
of a small square. This swampy hollow is the "Virgil's 
Grove," so elaborately described by Dodsley, and which so 
often in the last age employed the pencil and the burin ; and 
the two barrowfuls of brick are all that remain of the obelisk 
of Virgil. I had run not a few narrow chances of the kind 
before ; but I now fairly sunk half to the knees in the miry 
bottom, and then pressing onwards, as I best could, 

" Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea 
Nor good dry land, nigh foundered, on I fared, 
Treading the crude consistence half on foot, 
Half flying," 

till I reached a drier soil beside yet another lake in the chain, 
scarce less gloomy, and even more sequestered, than the last. 
There stick out along its edges a few blackened stumps, on 
which several bushy clusters of fern have taken root, and 
which, overshadowed by the pendent fronds, seem so many 
small tree-ferns. I marked here, for the first time, the glance 
of scales and the splash of fins in the water ; but they belonged 



ISO FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

not to the " fishes of gold " sung by the poet, but to some half- 
dozen pike that I suppose have long since dealt by the fishes 
Df gold as the bulkier contemporaries of the famous Jack the 
jriant Killer used to deal by their guests. A further walk of a 
few hundred yards through the wooded hollow brought me to 
tne angle where the forks of the dell unite and form one val- 
ley. A considerable piece of water — by much the largest on 
the grounds — occupies the bottom of the broad hollow which 
they form by their union, — the squat stem, to use a former 
illustration, of the letter Y ; and a long narrow bay runs from 
the main body of the lake up each of the two forks, losing itself 
equally in both, as it contracts and narrows, amid the over- 
arching trees. 

There is a harmony of form as certainly as of sound, — a 
music to the eye in the one, as surely as to the ear in the 
other. I had hitherto witnessed much dilapidation and decay, 
but it was dilapidation and decay on a small scale ; I had seen 
merely the wrecks of a few artificial toys, scattered amid the 
sublime of nature ; and there were no sensible jarrings in the 
silent concert of the graceful and the lovely, which the entire 
scene served to compose. Here, however, all of a sudden, I 
was struck by a harsh discord. Where the valley should have 
opened its noble gateway into the champaign, — a gateway 
placed half-way between the extended magnificence of the 
expanse below, and the more closely concentrated beauties of 
the twin dells above, — there stretches, from bank to bank, a 
stiff, lumpish, rectilinear mound, some seventy or eighty feet in 
height, by some two or three hundred yards in length, that bars 
out the landscape, — deals, in short, by the wanderer along the 
lake or through the lower reaches of the dell, as some refrac- 
tory land-steward deals by some hapless railway surveyor, 
when, squatting dow: full before him, he spreads out a broad 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 181 

extent of coat-tail, and eclipses the distant sight. Poor Shen- 
stone ! — it would have broken his heart. That unsightly 
mound conveys along its flat, level line, straight as that of a 
ruler, the Birmingham and Hales Owen Canal. Poor Shen- 
stone once more ! 'With the peculiar art in which he excelled 
all men, he had so laid out his lakes, that the last in the series 
seemed to piece on to the great twenty-acre lake dug by the 
monks, and so to lose itself in the general landscape. And in 
one of his letters we find him poetical on the course of the 
vagrant streams, — those of his own grounds, — that feed it. 
" Their first appearance," he says, " well resembles the playful- 
ness of infancy ; they skip from side to side with a thousand 
antic motions, that answer no other purpose than the mere 
amusement of the proprietor. They proceed for a few hundred 
yards, and then their severer labors begin, resembling the graver 
toils of manhood. They set mills in motion, turn wheels, and 
ply hammers for manufactures of all kinds ; and in this man- 
ner roll on under the name of the Stour, supplying works for 
casting, forging, and shaping iron for every civil and military 
purpose. Perhaps you may not know that my rills are the 
principal sources of this river ; or that it furnishes the propel- 
ling power to more iron-works than almost any other single 
river in the kingdom." The dull mound now cuts off the sport- 
ive infancy of the Stour from its sorely-tasked term of useful 
riverhood. There is so cruel a barrier raised between the twc 
stages, that we fail to identify the hard-working stream below 
with the playful little runnels above. The water comes bound- 
ing all obscurely out of the nether side of the mound, just as it 
begins its life of toil, — a poor thing without a pedigree, like 
some hapless child of quality stolen by the gypsies, and sol i to 
hard labor. 

Passing upwards along the opposite branch of the valley, I 
16 



182 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

found a succession of the same sort of minute desolations as I 
had met in the branch already explored. Shenstone's finest 
cascades lay in this direction ; and very fine, judging from the 
description of Dodsley, they must have been. " The eye is 
here presented," says the poetic bibliopole, " with a fairy 
vision, consisting of an irregular and romantic fall of water, 
one hundred and fifty yards in continuity ; and a very striking 
and unusual scene it affords. Other cascades may have the 
advantage of a greater descent and a larger stream ; but a 
more wild and romantic appearance of water, and at the same 
time strictly natural, is difficult to be met with anywhere. The 
scene, though small, is yet aggrandized with so much art, that 
we forget the quantity of water which flows through this close 
and overshadowed valley, and are so much pleased with the 
intricacy of the scene, and the concealed height from whence 
it flows, that we, without reflection, add the idea of magnifi- 
cence to that of beauty. In short, it is only upon reflection 
that we find the stream is not a Niagara, but rather a water- 
fall in miniature ; and that by the same artifice upon a larger 
scale, were there large trees in place of small ones, and a river 
instead of a rill, a scene so formed would exceed the utmost 
of our ideas." Alas for the beautiful cascade ! Here still was 
the bosky valley, dark and solitary, with its long withdrawing 
bay from the lake speckled by the broad leaves of the water- 
lily ; old gnarled stems of ivy wind, snake-like, round the same 
massy trunks along which they had been taught to climb in 
the days of the poet ; but for the waterfall, the main feature of 
the scene, I saw only a long dark trench, — much crusted by 
mosses and liverworts, and much overhung by wood, — that 
furrows the side of the hill ; and for the tasteful root-house, 
erected to catch all the beauties of the place, I fou:d only a 
few scattered masses of brick, bound fast together by he integ- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 183 

rity of the cementing lime, and half-buried in a brown stratum 
of decayed leaves. A little further on, there lay across the 
runnel a huge monumental urn of red sandstone, with the 
base elevated and the neck depressed. It dammed up enough 
of the little stream to form a reservoir at which an animal 
might drink, and the clayey soil around it was dibbled thick at 
the time by the tiny hoofs of sheep. The fallen urn had been 
inscribed to the memory of Somerville the poet. 

This southern fork of the valley is considerably shorter than 
the northern one ; and soon rising on the hill-side, I reached a 
circular clump of firs, from which the eye takes in the larger 
part of the grounds at a glance, with much of the surrounding 
country. We may see the Wrekin full in front, at the distance 
of about thirty miles ; and here, in the centre of the circular 
clump, there stood, says Dodsley, an octagonal seat, with a 
pedestal-like elevation in the middle, that served for a back, 
and on the top of which there was fixed a great punch-bowl, 
bearing as its appropriate inscription the old country toast, " To 
all friends round the Wrekin." Seat and bowl have long since 
vanished, and we see but the circular clump. At the foot of 
the hill there is a beautiful piece of water, narrow and long, 
and skirted by willows, with both its ends so hidden in wood, 
and made to wind so naturally, that instead of seeming what 
it is, — merely a small pond, — it seems one of the reaches 
of a fine river. We detect, too, the skill of the poet in the 
appearance presented from this point by the chain of lakes in 
the opposite fork of the valley. As seen through the carefully 
disposed trees, they are no longer detached pieces of water, but 
the reaches of a great stream, — a sweeping inflection, we may 
suppose, of the same placid river that we see winding through 
the willows, immediately at the hill-foot. The Leasowes, whose 
collected waters would scarce turn a mill, exhibit, from this cir- 



184 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

cular clump, their fine river scenery. The background beyond 
rises into a magnificent pyramid of foliage, the apex of which 
is formed by the tall hanging wood on the steep acclivity, and 
which sweeps downwards on each side in graceful undulations, 
now rising, now falling, according to the various heights of the 
trees or the inequalities of the ground. The angular space 
between the two forks of the valley occupies the foreground. 
It sinks in its descent towards the apex, — for the pyramid is 
of course an inverted one, — from a scene of swelling accliv- 
ities, fringed with a winding belt of squat, broad-stemmed 
beeches, into a soft sloping lawn, in the centre of which, 
deeply embosomed in wood, rise the white walls of the man- 
sion-house. And such, as they at present exist, are the Lea- 
sowes, — the singularly ingenious composition inscribed on an 
English hill-side, which employed for twenty long years the 
taste and genius of Shenstone. An eye accustomed to con- 
template nature merely in the gross, and impressed but by vast 
magnitudes or by great multiplicity, might not find much to 
admire in at least the more secluded scenes, — in landscapes a 
furlong or two in extent, and composed of merely a few trees, a 
few slopes, and a pond, or in gloomy little hollows, with inter- 
lacing branches high over head, and mossy runnels below. 
But to one not less accustomed to study the forms than to feel 
the magnitudes, — who can see spirit and genius in even a 
vignette, beauty in the grouping of a clump, in the sweep of a 
knoll, in the convexity of a mossy bank, in the glitter of a 
half-hidden stream, or the blue gleam of a solitary lochan, — 
one who can appreciate all in nature that the true landscape- 
painter admires and develops, — will still find much to engage 
him amid the mingled woods and waters, sloping acclivities, 
and hollow valleys, of the Leasowes. I have not yet seen a 
piece of ground of equal extent that exhibits a tithe of its 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 185 

variety, or in which a few steps so completely alters a scene. 
In a walk of half a mile one might fill a whole portfolio with 
sketches, all fine and all various. 

It was chiefly in the minuter landscapes of the place that I 
missed the perished erections of the poet. The want of some 
central point on which the attention might first concentrate, 
ami then, as it were, let itself gradually out on the surround- 
ing objects, served frequently to remind me of one of the poet's 
own remarks. "A rural scene to me is never perfect," he 
says, " without the addition of some kind of building. I have, 
however, known a scar of rock in great measure supplying the 
deficiency." Has the reader observed how unwittingly Bewick 
seems to have stumbled on this canon, and how very frequently 
the scar of rock — somewhat a piece of mannerism, to be sure, 
but always fine, and always picturesquely overhung with 
foliage — is introduced as the great central object into his 
vignettes ? In nature's, too, the effect, when chance embodied 
in some recluse scene, must have been often remarked. I have 
seen a huge rock-like boulder, roughened by lichens, giving 
animation and cheerfulness to the wild solitude of a deep 
forest-clearing ; and a gray undressed obelisk, reared many 
centuries ago over the savage dead, imparting picturesqueness 
and interest to a brown sterile moor. 

With the poet's erections, every trace of his leaser ingenu- 
ities has disappeared from the landscape, — his peculiar art, 
for instance, of distancing an object to aggrandize his space, 
or in contriving that the visiter should catch a picturesque 
glimpse of it just at the point where it looked best ; and that 
then, losing sight of it, he should draw near by some hidden 
path, over which the eye had not previously travelled. The 
artist, with his many-hued pigments at command, makes one 
object seem near and another distant, by giving to the one a 
16* 



186 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

deeper and to the other a fainter tinge of color. Shenstone, 
with a palette much less liberally furnished, was skilful enough 
to pro duce similar effects with his variously-tinted shrubs and 
trees. He made the central object in his vista some temple or 
root-house, of a faint retiring color ; planted around it trees 
of a diminutive size and a " blanched fady hue," such as the 
"almond willow" and "silver osier;" then, after a blank 
space, he planted another group of a deeper tinge, — trees of 
the average hue of the forest, such as the ash and the elm ; 
and then, last of all, in the foreground, after another blank 
space, he laid down trees of deep-tinted foliage, such as the 
dark glossy holly, and the still darker yew. To the aerial, too, 
he added the linear perspective. He broadened his avenues in 
the foreground, and narrowed them as they receded ; and the 
deception produced he describes — and we may well credit 
him, for he was not one of the easily satisfied — as very re- 
markable. The distance seemed greatly to increase, and the 
grounds to broaden and extend. We may judge, from the 
nature of the device, of the good reason he had to be mortally 
wroth with members of the Lyttelton family, when, as John- 
son tells us, they used to make a diversion in favor of Hagley, 
somewhat in danger of being eclipsed at the time, by bringing 
their visiters to look up his vistas from the wrong end. The 
picture must have been set in a wofully false light, and turned 
head-downwards to boot, when the distant willows waved in 
the foreground beside the dimly-tinted obelisk or portico, and 
the nearer yews and hollies rose stiff, dark, and diminutive, 
in an avenue that broadened as it receded, a half-dozen bow- 
shots behind them. Hogarth's famous caricature on the false 
perspective of his contemporary brethren of the easel would 
in such a case be nc caricature at all, but a truthful represcnt- 
ati m of one of Shenstone's vistas viewed from the wrong end. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 187 

Some of the other arts of the poet, are, however, as I have 
already had occasion to remark, still very obvious. It was one 
of his canons, that when " an object had been once viewed 
from its proper point, the foot should never travel to it by the 
same path which the eye had travelled over before." The 
visiter suddenly lost it, and then drew near obliquely. We 
can still see that all his pathways, in order to accommodate 
themselves to this canon, were covered ways, which winded 
through thickets and hollows. Ever and anon, whenever there 
was augnt of interest to be seen, they emerged into the open 
day, like moles rising for a moment to the light, and then 
straightway again buried themselves from view. It was another 
of his canons, that " the eye should always look down upon 
water." " Customary nature," he remarks, " made the thing 
a necessary requisite." " Nothing," it is added, " could be 
more sensibly displeasing than the breadth of flat ground," 
which an acquaintance, engaged, like the poet, though less 
successfully, in making a picture-gallery of his property, had 
placed " between his terrace and his lake." Now, in the Lea- 
sovves, wherever water is made to enter into the composition 
of the landscape, the eye looks down upon it from a command- 
ing elevation, — the visiter never feels, as he contemplates it, 
that he is in danger of being carried away by a flood, should 
an embankment give way. It was yet further one of Shen- 
stone's canons, that " no mere slope from the one side to the 
other can be agreeable ground : the eye requires a balance," 
not, however, of the kind satirized by Pope, in which 

" Each alley has its brother, 
And half the platform just reflects the other ;" 

but the kind of balance which the higher order of landscape- 
painters ra r ely fail to introduce into their works " A build- 



1SS FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ing, for iistance, on one side may be made to contrast with a 
group of trees, a large oak, or a rising hill, on the other." And 
in meet illustration of this principle, we find that all the scenes 
of the Least wes are at least well balanced, though most of 
their central points are unluckily away : the eye never slides 
off the landscape, but cushions itself upon it with a sense of 
security and repose; and the feeling, even when one fails to 
trace it to its origin, is agreeable. " Whence," says the poet, 
1 does this taste proceed, but from the love we bear to regular- 
ity in perfection ? But, after all, in regard to gardens, the 
shape of the ground, the disposition of the trees, and the figure 
of the water, must be sacred to nature, and no forms must be 
allowed that make a discovery of art." 

England has produced many greater poets than Shenstone, 
but she never produced a greater landscape-gardener. In at 
least this department he stands at the head of his class, unap- 
proachable and apart, whether pitted against the men of his 
own generation, or those of the three succeeding ones. And 
in any province in which mind must be exerted, it is at least 
something to be first. The estimate of Johnson cannot fail to 
be familiar to almost every one. It is, however, so true in 
itself, and so exquisitely characteristic of stately old Samuel, 
that I must indulge in the quotation. " Now was excited his 
[Shenstone's] delight in rural pleasures, and his ambition of 
rural elegance. He began to point his prospects, to diversify 
his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; 
which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his 
little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the 
skilful, — a place to be visited by travellers and copied by 
designers. Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and 
to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch 
the view, — to make water run where it will be heard, and to 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 189 

stagnate where it will be seen, — to leave intervals where the 
eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there 
is something to be hidden, — demand any great powers of 
mind, I will not inquire : perhaps a surly and sullen spectator 
may think such performances rather the sport than the business 
of human reason. But it must be at least confessed, that to 
embellish the form of Nature is an innocent amusement; and 
some praise must be allowed, by the most supercilious observer, 
to him who does best what such multitudes are contending to 
do well." 

But though England had no such landscape-gardener as 
Shenstone, it possessed denizens not a few who thought more 
highly of their own taste than of his ; and so the history of the 
Leasowes, for the ten years that immediately succeeded his 
death, is a history of laborious attempts to improve what he 
had rendered perfect. This history we find recorded by Gold- 
smith in one of his less known essays. Considerable allow- 
ance must be made for the peculiar humor of the writer, and 
its exaggerative tendency ; for no story, real or imaginary, ever 
lost in the hands of Goldsmith ; but there is at least an air of 
truth about its general details. " The garden," he says, " was 
completely grown and finished : the marks of every art were 
covered up by the luxuriance of nature, — the winding walks 
were grown dark, — the brooks assumed a natural selvage, — 
and the rocks were covered with moss. Nothing now remained 
but to enjoy the beauties of the place, when the poor poet died, 
and his garden was obliged to be sold for the benefit of those 
who had contributed to its embellishment. 

" The L<eauties of the place had now for some time been 
celebrated as well in prose as in verse ; and all men of taste 
wished for so envied a spot, where every turn was marked 
with the poet's pencil, and every walk awakened genius and 



190 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

meditation. The first purchaser was one Mr. Truepenny, a 
button-maker, who was possessed of three thousand pounds, 
and was willing also to be possessed of taste and genius. 

" As the poet's ideas were for the natural wildness of the 
landscape, the button-maker's were for the more regular produc- 
tions of art. He conceived, perhaps, that as it is a beauty in a 
button to be of a regular pattern, so the same regularity ought 
to obtain in a landscape. Be that as it will, he employed the 
shears to some purpose ; he clipped up the hedges, cut down 
the gloomy walks, made vistas on the stables and hog-sties, 
and showed his friends that a man of true taste should always 
be doing. 

" The next candidate for taste and genius was a captain of 
a ship, who bought the garden because the former possessor 
could find nothing more to mend ; but unfortunately he had 
taste too. His great passion lay in building, — in making 
Chinese temples and cage-work summer-houses. As the place 
before had the appearance of retirement, and inspired medita- 
tion, he gave it a more peopled air; every turning presented a 
cottage or icehouse, or a temple ; the garden was converted into 
a little city, and it only wanted inhabitants to give it the air 
of a village in the East Indies. 

" In this manner, in less than ten years the improvement 
has gone through the hands of as many proprietors, who were 
all willing to have taste, and to show their taste too. As the 
place had received its best finishing from the hands of the first 
possessor, so every innovator only lent a hand to do mischief. 
Those parts wnt ;h were obscure have been enlightened; those 
walks which led naturally have been twisted into serpentine 
windings. The color of the flowers of the field k not more 
various than the variety of tastes that have been employed 
here, and all in direct contradiction to the original aim of its 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 191 

first improver. Could the original possessor but revive, with 
what a sorrowful heart would he look upon his favorite spot 
again ! He would scarcely recollect a dryad or a wood nymph 
of his former acquaintance ; and might perhaps find himself as 
much a stranger in his own plantation as in the deserts of 
Siberia." 

The after history of the Leasowes is more simple. 'Iim 
as certainly as taste, though much less offensively, had be 
busy with seat and temple, obelisk and root-house ; and it \\u^ 
soon found that, though the poet had planted, he had not built, 
for posterity. The ingenious antiquary of Wheatfield discov- 
ered in the parsonage-house garden of his village, some time 
about the middle of the last century, a temple of lath and plas- 
ter, which had been erected, he held, by the old Romans, and 
dedicated to Claudius Caesar ; but the lath and plaster of these 
degenerate days do not last quite so long. The progress of 
dilapidation was further accelerated by the active habits of 
occasional visiters. Young men tried their strength by setting 
their shoulders to the obelisks ; and old women demonstrated 
their wisdom by carrying home pieces of the seats to their fires : 
a robust young fellow sent poor Mr. Somerville's urn a spin- 
ning down the hill ; a vigorous iconoclast beheaded the piping 
fawn at a blow. There were at first large additions made to 
the inscriptions, of a kind which Shenstone could scarce have 
anticipated ; but anon inscriptions and additions too began to 
disappear ; the tablet in the dingle suddenly failed to compli- 
ment Mr. Spence ; and Virgil's Grove no longer exhibited the 
name of Virgil. " The ruinated Priory wall " became too 
thoroughly a ruin ; the punch-bowl was shivered on its stand ; 
the iron ladle wrenched from beside the ferruginous spring ; 
in short, much about the time when young Walter Scott was 
gloating over Dodsley, and wishing he, too, had a property of 



192 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

which to make a plaything, what Shenstone had built ana 
inscribed on the Leasowes could be known but from Dodsley 
alone. His artificialities had perished, like the artificialities 
of another kind of the poets his contemporaries ; and nothing 
survived in his more material works, as in their writings, save 
those delightful portions in which he had but given body and 
expression to the harmonies of nature. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 193 



CHAPTER X. 

Shenstone's Verses. — The singular Unhappiness of his Paradise. — Eng- 
lish Cider. — Scotch and English Dwellings contrasted. — The Nailers 
of Hales Owen ; their Politics a Century ago. — Competition of the 
Scotch Nailers ; unsuccessful, and why. — Samuel Salt, the Hales Owen 
Poet. — Village Church. — Salt Works at Droitwich ; their great Anti- 
quity. — Appearance of the Village. — Problem furnished by the Salt 
Deposits of England ; various Theories. — Rock Salt deemed by some a 
Volcanic Product ; by others the Deposition of an overcharged Sea ; by 
yet others the Produce of vast Lagoons. — Leland. — The Manufacture 
of Salt from Sea-water superseded, even in Scotland, by the Rock Salt 
of England. 

It was now near sunset, and high time that 1 should be 
leaving the Leasowes, to " take mine ease in mine inn." By 
the way, one of the most finished among Shenstone's lesser 
pieces is a paraphrase on the apophthegm of old Sir John. "We 
find Dr. Samuel Johnson, as exhibited in the chronicle of Bos- 
well, conning it over with meikle glee in an inn at Chapel- 
house ; and it was certainly no easy matter to write verse that 
satisfied the doctor. 

" To thee, fair Freedom ! I retire, 

From flattery, cards, and dice, and din ; 
Nor art thou found in mansions higher 
Than the low cot or humble inn. 

" 'T is here with boundless power I reign ; 
And every health which I begin 
Converts dull port to bright champagne ; 
Such freedom crowns it at an inn. 
17 



194 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

" I fly from pomp, I fly from plate, 

I fly from falsehood's specious grin ; 
Freedom I love, and form I hate, 
And choose my lodgings at an inn. 

" Here, waiter, take my sordid ore, 

Which lacqueys else might hope to "win ; 
It buys what courts have not in store, — 
It buys me freedom at an inn. 

" Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, 
• Where'er his stages may have been, 
May sigh to think he still has found 
The warmest welcome at an inn." 

Ere, however, quitting the grounds to buy freedom s the 
" Plume of Feathers," I could not avoid indulging in a nat- 
ural enough reflection on the unhappiness of poor Shenstone. 
Never, as we may see from his letters, was there a man who 
enjoyed life less. He was not vicious ; he had no overpower- 
ing passion to contend with ; he could have had his Phillis, 
had he chosen to take her ; his fortune, nearly three hundred 
a-year, should have been quite ample enough, in the reign of 
George the Second, to enable a single man to live, and even, 
with economy, to furnish a considerable surplus for making 
gimcracks in the Leasowes ; he had many amusements, — he 
drew tastefully, had a turn, he tells us, for natural history, 
wrote elegant verse and very respectable prose ; the noble and 
the gifted of the land honored him with their notice ; above all, 
he lived in a paradise, the beauties of which no man could 
better appreciate ; and his most serious employment, like that 
of our common ancestor in his unfallen state, was " to dress and 
to keep it." And yet, even before he had involved his affairs, 
and the dun came to the door, he was an unhappy man. " I 
have lost my road to happiness," we find him saying ere he had 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 195 

completed his thirty-fourth year. Nay, we even find him quite 
aware of the turning at which he had gone wrong. " Instead," 
he adds, " of pursuing the way to the fine lawns and venerable 
oaks which distinguish the region of happiness, I am got into 
the pitiful parterre -garden of amusement, and view the nobler 
scenes at a distance. I think I can see the road, too, that leads 
the better way, and can show it to others ; but I have got many 
miles to measure back before I can get into it myself, and no 
kind of resolution to take a single step. My chief amusements 
at present are the same they have long been, and lie scattered 
about my farm. The French have what they call a par que 
or nh, — I suppose, approaching about as near to a garden as 
the park at Hagley. I give my place the title of a ferme 
omee." Still more significant is the frightful confession em- 
bodied in the following passage, written at a still earlier period : 
— " Every little uneasiness is sufficient to introduce a whole 
train of melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly 
dissatisfied with the life I now lead, and the life which I foresee 
1 shall lead. I am angry, and envious, and dejected, and 
frantic, and disregard all present things, just as becomes a 
madman to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is a gloomy 
joy, with the application of Dr. Swift's complaint, ' that he is 
forced to die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.' " Amuse- 
ment becomes, I am afraid, not very amusing when rendered 
the exclusive business of one's life. All that seems necessary 
in order to render fallen Adams thoroughly miserable, is just 
to place them in paradises, and, debarring them serious occupa- 
tion, to give them full permission to make themselves as happy 
as they can. It was more in mercy than in wrath that the first 
father of the race, after his nature had become contaminated 
by the fall, was driven out of Eden. Well would it have been 
for poor Shen^tone had the angel of stern necessity driven him 



196 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

also, early in the day, out of his paradise, and sent him into the 
work-day world beyond, to eat bread in lie sweat of his brow. 
I quitted the Leasowes in no degree saddened by the consider- 
ation that I had been a hard-working man all my life, from 
boyhood till now ; and that the future, in this respect, held out 
to me no brighter prospect than I had realized in the past. 

When passing through York, I had picked up at a stall a 
good old copy of the poems of Philips, — John, not Ambrose ; 
and in railway carriages and on coach-tops I had revived my 
acquaintance, broken off for twenty years, with " Cider, a 
Poem," " Blenheim," and the " Splendid Shilling; " and now, 
in due improvement of the lessons of so judicious a master, 1 
resolved, when taking my ease in the " Plume of Feathers," 
that, for one evening at least, I should drink only cider. 

" Fallacious drink ! ye honest men, beware, 
Nor trust its smoothness ; the third circling glass 
Suffices virtue." 

The cider of the " Plume " was, however, scarce so potent as 
that sung by Philips. I took the third permitted glass, after a 
dinner transposed far into the evening by the explorations of the 
day, without experiencing a very great deal of the exhilarating 
feeling described, — 

" Or lightened heart, 
Dilate "with fervent joy, or eager soul, 
Keen to pursue the sparkling glass amain." 

Nor was the temptation urgent to make up in quantity what 
was wanting in strength : " the third circling glass sufficed 
virtue." Here, as at the inns in which I had baited, both at 
Durham and York, I was struck by the contrast which many 
of the older English dwelling-houses furnish to our Scotch ones 
of the same age. In Scotland the walls are of solid stone-work, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 197 

thick and massy, with broad-headed, champer-edged rybats, and 
ponderous soles and lintels, selvaging the opening; whereas 
the wood-work of tie interior is almost always slight and 
fragile, formed of spongy deal or moth-hollowed fir rafters. 
After the lapse of little more than a century, there are few of 
our Scotch floors on which it is particularly safe to tread. In 
the older English dwellings we generally find a reverse con- 
dition of things : the outsides, constructed of slim brick-work, 
nave a toy-like fragility about them : whereas inside we find 
strong oaken beams, and long-enduring floors and stairs of 
glossy wainscot. We of course at once recognize the great 
scarcity of good building-stone in the one country, and of well- 
grown forest-wood in the other, as the original and adequate 
cause of the peculiarity. Their dwelling-houses seem to have 
had different starting points ; those of the one being true lineal 
descendants of the old Pict's house, complete from foundation 
to summit without wood, — those of the other, lineal descend- 
ants of the old forest-dwellings of the Saxon, formed ship-like 
in their unwieldy oaken strength, without stone. Wood to the 
one class was a mere subordinate accident, of late introduction, 
— stone to the other ; and were I sent to seek out the half-way 
representatives of each, I would find those of England in its 
ancient beam-formed houses of the days of Elizabeth, in which 
only angular interstices in the walls are occupied by brick, and 
those of Scotland in its time-shattered fortalices of the type of 
the old castle of Craig-house, in Ross-shire, where floor rises 
above floor in solid masonry, or of the type of Borthwick-castle, 
near Edinburgh, stone from foundation to ridge. 

I spent some time next morning in sauntering among the cros& 

lanes of Hales Owen, now and then casting vague guesses, 

from the appearance of the humbler houses, — for what else lies 

within reach of the passing traveller? — regarding the character 

17* 



198 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and condition of the inmates ; and now and then looking in 
through open windows and doors at the nailers, male and 
female, engaged amid their intermittent hammerings and fitful 
showers of sparks. As might be anticipated of a profession 
fixed very much down to the corner of a country, and so domes- 
tic in its nature, nail-making is hereditary in the families that 
pursue it. The nailers of Hales Owen in the present day are 
the descendants of the nailers who, as Shenstone tells us, were 
so intelligent in the cause of Hanover during the outburst of 
1745. " The rebellion," he says, in writing a friend just two 
months after the battle of Prestonpans, " is, as you may guess, 
the subject of all conversation. Every individual nailer here 
takes in a newspaper, and talks as familiarly of kings and 
princes as ever Master Shallow did of John of Gaunt." 
Scarcely a century had gone by, and I now found, from 
snatches of conversation caught in the passing, that the nailers 
of Hales Owen were interested in the five points of the Charter 
and the success of the League, and thought much more of 
what they deemed their own rights, than of the rights of either 
monarchs de facto or monarchs de jure. There was a nail- 
manufactory established about seventy years ago at Cromarty, 
in the north of Scotland, which reared not a few Scotch nailers ; 
but they seemed to compete on unequal terms with those of 
England ; and after a protracted struggle of rather more than 
half a century, the weaker went to the wall, and the Cromarty 
nail-works ceased. There is now only a single nail-forge in 
the town ; and this last of the forges is used for other purposes 
than the originally intended one. I found in Hales Owen the 
"rue key to the failure of the Cromarty manufactory, and saw 
how it had come to be undersold in its own northern field by 
the nail-merchants of Birmingham. The Cromarty nailer 
vrought alone, or, if a family man, assisted but by his sons * 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 199 

whereas the Hales Owen nailer had, with the assistance of his 
sons, that of his wife, daughters, and maiden sisters to boot ; 
and so he bore down the Scotchman in the contest, through 
the aid lent him by his female auxiliaries, in the way his blue- 
painted ancestors, backed by not only all the fighting men, but 
also all the fighting women of the district, used to bear down 
the enemy. 

In passing a small bookseller's shop, in which I had marked 
on the counter an array of second-hand books, I dropped in to 
see whether I might not procure a cheap edition of Shenstone, 
with Dodsley's description, and found a tidy little woman 
behind the counter, who would fain, if she could, have suited 
ne to my mind. But she had no copy of Shenstone, nor had 
she ever heard of Shenstone. She well knew Samuel Salt, the 
Hales Owen tee-total poet, and could sell me a copy of his 
works ; but of the elder poet of Hales Owen she knew nothing. 
I bought from her two of Samuel's broadsheets, — the one a 
wrathful satire on the community of Odd-Fellows ; the other, 
" A Poem on Drunkenness." 

"0, how silly is the drinker ! 

Swallowing what he does not need • 
In the eyes of every thinker 

He must be a fool indeed. 
How he hurts his constitution ! 
All for want of resolution 

Not to yield to drink at first ! ' ' 

Such is the verse known within a mile of the Leasowes, 
while that of their poet is forgotten. Alas for fame ! Poor 
Shenstone could scarce have anticipated that the thin Castalia 
of tee-totalism was to break upon his writings, like a mill-dam 
during a thunder-storm, to cover up all their elegances from 



200 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the sight where they should be best known, and present instead 
but a turbid expar.se of water. 

I got access to the parish church, a fine old pile of red 
sandstone, which dates, in some of its more ancient portions, 
beyond the Norman conquest. One gorgeous marble, senti- 
neled by figures of Benevolence, Fidelity, and Major Halliday, 
all very classic and fine, and which cost, as my guide informed 
me, a thousand pounds, failed greatly to excite my interest : I 
at least found that a simple pedestal in front of it, surmounted 
by a plain urn, impressed me more. The pedestal bears a 
rather lengthy inscription, in the earlier half of which there is 
a good deal of verbiage ; but in the concluding half the writer 
seems to have said nearly what he intended to say. 



"Reader, if genius, taste refined, 
A native elegance of mind, — 
If virtue, science, manly sense, 
If wit that never gave offence, 
The clearest head, the tenderest heart, 
In thy esteem e'er claimed a part, — 
! smite thy breast, and drop a tear, 
For know, thy Shenstone's dust lies here." 

The Leasowes engaged me for the remainder of the day; and I 
figain walked, over them a few weeks later in the season, when 
the leaf hung yellow on the tree, and the films of gray silky 
gossamer went sailing along the opener glades in the clear 
frosty air. But I have already recorded my impressions of the 
place, independently of date, as if all formed at one visit. I 
must now take a similar liberty with the chronology of my wend- 
ings in another direction ; and, instead of passing direct to the 
Clent Hills in my narrative, as I did in my tour, describe, first 
% posterior visit paid to the brine-springs at Droitwich. I shal 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 201 

by and by attempt imparting to the reader, from some com- 
manding summit of the Clent range, a few general views 
regarding the geology of the landscape; and by first bearing 
me company on my visit to Droitwich, he will be the better 
able to keep pace with me in my after survey. 

The prevailing geological system in this part of England is 
the New Red Sandstone, Upper and Lower. It stretches for 
many miles around the Dudley coal-basin, much in the way 
that the shires of Stirling and Dumbarton stretch around the 
waters of Loch Lomond, or the moors of Sutherland or the 
hills of Inverness-shire encircle the waters of Loch Shin or 
Loch Ness. In the immediate neighborhood of the basin we 
find only the formations of the lower division of the system, 
and these are of comparatively little economic value : they 
contain, however, a calcareous conglomerate, which represents 
the magnesian limestone of the northern counties, and which 
in a very few localities is pure enough to be wrought for its 
lime : they contain, too, several quarries of the kind of soft 
building sandstone which I found the old stone-mason engaged 
in sawing at Hagley. But while the lower division of the New 
Red is thus unimportant, its upper division is, we find, not 
greatly inferior in economic value to the Coal Measures them- 
selves. It forms the inexhaustible storehouse of our household 
salt, — all that we employ in our fisheries, in our meat-curing 
establishments for the army and navy, in our agriculture, in 
our soda manufactories, — all that fuses our glass and fertilizes 
our fields, imparts the detergent quality to our soap, and gives 
us salt herrings and salt pork, and everything else salt that 
is the better for being so, down to our dinner celery and our 
breakfast eggs ; it forms, in short, to use a Scoticism, the great 
salt-backet of the empira ; and the hand, however frequently 
thrust into it, never finds an empty corner. By pursuing south- 



202 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

wards, for seven or eight miles, the road which, passing through 
Hales Owen, forms the principal street of the village, we rise 
from the lower incoherent marls, soft sandstones, and calcareous 
conglomerates of the system, to the equally incoherent marls, 
and nearly equally soft sandstones, of its upper division ; and, 
some five or six miles further on, reach the town of Droitwich, 
long famous for its salt springs. There were salt-works at 
Droitwich in the times of the Romans, and ever since the times 
of the Romans. In the age of the Heptarchy, Kenulph, King 
of Mercia, after cutting off the hands and putting out the eyes 
of his brother-king, Egbert of Kent, squared his accounts with 
Heaven by giving ten salt-furnaces in Droitwich to the church 
of Worcester. Poor Edwy of England, nearly two centuries 
after, strove, though less successfully, to purchase the Church's 
sanction to his union with his second cousin, the beautiful 
Elgiva, by giving it five salt-furnaces more. In all probability, 
the salt that seasoned King Alfred's porridge, when he lived 
with the neat-herd, was supplied by the works at Droitwich. 
And still the brine comes welling up, copious as ever. I saw 
one powerful spring boiling amid the twilight gloom of its deep 
pot, like a witch's cauldron in a cavern, that employs a steam- 
engine night and day to pump it to the surface, and furnishes 
a thousand tons of salt weekly. In 1779, says Nashe, in his 
History of Worcestershire, the net salt duties of the empire 
amounted to about two hundred and forty thousand pounds, 
and of that sum not less than seventy-five thousand pounds 
were derived from the salt-works at Droitwich. 

The town lies low. There had been much rain for several 
days previous to that of ny visit, — the surrounding fields had 
the dank blackened look so unlovely in autumn to the eye of 
the farmer, and the roads and streets were dark with mud. 
Most of the houses wore the dingy tints of a remote and some- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 203 

what neglected antiquity. Droitwich was altogether, as I saw 
it, a sombre-looking place, with its gray old church looking 
down upon it from a scraggy wood-covered hill ; and what 
struck me as peculiarly picturesque was, that from this dark 
centre there should be passing continually outwards, by road 
or canal, wagons, carts, track-boats, barges, all laden with 
pure white salt, that looked in the piled-up heaps like wreaths 
of drifted snow. There could not be two things more unlike 
than the great staple of the town, and the town itself. There 
hung, too, over the blackened roofs, a white volume of vapor, 
— the steam of the numerous salt-pans, driven off in the course 
of evaporation by the heat, — which also strikingly contrasted 
with the general blackness. The place has its two extensive 
salt-works, — the old and the new. To the new I was denied 
access ; but it mattered little, as I got ready admittance to the 
old. The man who superintended the pumping engine, though 
he knew me merely as a curious traveller somewhat mud-be- 
spattered, stopped the machine for a few seconds, that I might 
see undisturbed the brine boiling up from its secret depths ; 
and I was freely permitted to take the round of the premises, 
and to examine the numerous vats in their various stages of 
evaporation. It is pleasant to throw one's self, unknown and 
unrecommended, on the humanity of one's fellows, and to 
receive kindness simply as a man ! 

As I saw the vats seething over the furnaces, some of them 
more than already half-filled with the precipitated salt, and 
bearing atop a stratum of yellowish-colored fluid, the grand 
problem furnished by the saline deposits of this formation rose 
before me in all its difficulty. Geology propounds many a 
hard question to its students, — questions quite hard and diffi- 
cult enough to keep down their comeit, unless, indeed, very 
largely developed ; and few of these seem more inexplicable 



204 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

than th3 problem furnished by the salt deposits. Here, now, 
are these briny springs welling out of this Upper New Red 
Sandstone of central England, — springs whose waters w r ere 
employed in making salt two thousand years ago, and which 
still throw up that mineral at the rate of a thousand tons apiece 
weekly, without sign of diminution in either their volume or 
their degree of saturation ! At Stoke Prior, about three miles 
to the east of Droitwich, a shaft of four hundred and sixty 
feet has been sunk in the Upper New Red, and four beds of 
rock-salt passed through, the united thickness of which amount 
to eighty-five feet. Nor does this comprise the entire thick- 
ness, as the lower bed, though penetrated to the depth of thirty 
feet, has not been perforated. In the salt-mines of Cheshire, 
the beds are of still greater thickness, — an upper bed measur- 
ing in depth seventy-eight feet, and an under bed, to which no 
bottom has yet been found, a hundred and twenty feet. And 
in Poland and Spain there occur salt deposits on a larger scale 
still. The saliferous district of Cordova, for instance, has its 
solid hills of rock-salt, which nearly equal in height and bulk 
Arthur's Seat taken from the level of Holyrood House. How, 
I inquired, beside the flat steaming cauldrons, as I marked the 
white crystals arranging their facets at the bottom, — how 
were these mighty deposits formed in the grand laboratory of 
Nature ? Formed they must have been, in this part of the 
world, in an era long posterior to that of the Coal ; and in 
Spain, where they belong to the cretaceous group, in an era 
long posterior to that of the Oolite. They are more imme- 
diately underlaid in England by a sandstone constituting the 
base of the Upper New Red, which is largely charged with 
vegetable remains of a peculiar and well-marked character; 
and the equally well-marked flora of the carboniferous period 
lies entombed many hundred feet below. All the rocK-salt in 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 205 

the kingdom must have been formed since the more recent 
vegetation of the Red Sandstone lived and died, and was 
entombed ami I the smooth sands of some deep-sea bottom. 

But how formed ? Several antagonist theories have been 
promulgated in attempted resolution of the puzzle. By some 
the salt has been regarded as a volcanic product ejected from 
beneath ; by some, as the precipitate of a deep ocean over- 
charged with saline matter ; by some, as a deposit of salt-water 
lakes cut off from the main sea, like the salt lagoons of the 
tropics, by surf-raised spits or bars, and then dried up by the 
heat of the sun. It seems fatal to the first theory, that the 
eras of Plutonic disturbance in this part of the kingdom are 
of a date anterior to the era of the Saliferous Sandstone. The 
Clent Hills belong to the latest period of trappean eruption 
traceable in the midland counties ; and they were unquestion- 
ably thrown up, says Murchison, shortly after the close of the 
Carboniferous era, — many ages ere the Saliferous era began. 
Besides, what evidence have we derived from volcanoes, either 
recent or extinct, that rock-salt, in deposits so enormously huge, 
is a volcanic product ? Volcanoes in the neighborhood of the 
sea — and there are but few very active ones that have not the 
sea for their neighbor — deposit not unfrequently a crust of 
salt on the rocks and lavas that surround their craters ; but we 
never hear of their throwing down vast saliferous beds, con- 
tinuous for great distances, like those of the New Red Sand- 
stone of England. And further, even were salt in such huge 
quantity an unequivocally volcanic production, how account 
for its position and arrangement here ? How account for the 
occurrence of a volcanic product, spreading away in level beds 
and layers for nearly two hundred miles, in one of the least 
disturbed of the English formations, and forming no incon- 
siderable portion of its strata ? As for the second theory, it 
IS 



206 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

seems exceedingly difficult to conceive how, in an open sea, 
subject, of course, like all open seas, to such equalizing influ- 
ences as the ruffling of the winds and the deeper stirrings of the 
tides, any one tract of water should become so largely saturated 
as to throw down portions of its salt, when the surrounding 
tracts, less strongly impregnated, retained theirs. 1 have seen 
a fish-curer's vat throwing down its salt when surcharged with 
the mineral, but never any one stronger patch of the brine 
doing so ere the general mixture around it had attained to the 
necessary degree of saturation. And the lagoon theory, though 
apparently more tenable than any of the others, seems scarce 
less enveloped in difficulty. The few inches, at most few feet, 
of salt which line the bottoms and sides of the lagoons of the 
tropics, are but poor representatives of deposits of salt like 
those of the Upper Old Red of Cheshire ; and Geology, as has 
been already indicated, has its deposits huger still. Were one 
of the vast craters of the moon — Tycho or Copernicus — to 
be filled with sea-water to the brim, and the fires of twenty 
iEtnas to be lighted up under it, we could scarce expect as the 
result a greater salt-making than that of Cordova or Cracow. 
A bed of salt a hundred feet in thickness would demand for its 
salt-pan a lagoon many hundred feet in depth; and lagoons 
many hundred feet in depth, in at least the present state of 
things, are never evaporated.^ 

* Dr. Friedrich Parrot, the Russian traveller, gives a brief account, in 
his "Journey to Ararat" (1836), of the salt lakes that now mark the 
site of the inland sea which seems to have once occupied a large portion 
of the central basin of Asia. Their salt, however, though abundant and 
valuable regarded as an article of traffic and a source of revenue, would 
form, we find, but an inconsiderable geologic deposit, — a stratum scarce 
equal to the thinnest of the unworkable seams at Stoke Prior or North- 
wich. " At the western extremity of the expansion of the river Manech, 
on its northern shore," says the traveller, " are a number of salt lakes, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 207 

The salt-works at Droitwich were visited, in the reign of 
Henry the Eighth, by Leland the antiquary. He "asked a 
Salter," he tells us, " how many furnaces they had in all ; and 
the Salter numbered them to an eighteen score, saying, that 
every one paid yearly to the king six shillings and eightpence." 
" Making salt," the antiquary adds, " is a notable destruction 
of wood, — six thousand loads of the young pole-wood, easily 
cloven, being used twelvemonthly ; and the lack of wood is 
now perceivable in all places near the Wyche, on as far as 
Worcester." The Dudley coal-field seerns to have been 
bioached just in time to preserve to the midland districts their 
iron and salt trade. The complaint that the old forests were 
well-nigh gone was becoming general, when, in 1662, a Dud- 
ley miner took out a patent for smelting his ironstone with coke 
astead of charcoal ; and the iron trade of England has been 

the largest of which, there called Grusnoe Azore, is probably the same 
that is distinguished in our maps by the name of the new salt lake, and 
is five miles long, and two-thirds of a mile wide. These lakes have the 
property, in common with others of the same kind, that during the hot- 
test season of the year, which, in these parts, is from May to the end of 
August, the surface of the water becomes covered with a crust of salt 
nearly an inch thick, which is collected with shovels into boats, and piled 
away. This is managed by private individuals, who rent the privilege 
from the government of the Don, on condition of paying a tenth of the 
produce. On this occasion I was much interested in being able to prove 
to my own satisfaction, that in such lakes it is nothing more than the 
rapid evaporation from the heat of the sun, and the consequent super- 
saturation of the water with salt, that effects the crystallization of the 
latter ; for these lakes are so shallow that the little boats in which the 
salt is gathered are generally trailing on the bottom, and leave a long 
furrow behind them on it ; so that the lake is consequently to be regarded 
as a wide pan of enormous superficial extent, in which the brine can 
easily reach the degree of concentration required ; while, on the other 
hand, if the summer prove cold or rainy, the superfluous water must 
necessarily militate against the crystallization of the salt, or even prevent 
it altogether." 



208 FIRST IMrRESSIONS OF 

on the increase ever since. And only a few years later, the 
salters of Droitwich became equally independent of the nearly 
exhausted forests, by lighting up their "eighteen score fur- 
naces " with coal. The railways and canals of the country have 
since snread the rock-salt of the New Red Sandstone over the 
empire and it is a curious fact, that some of our old estab- 
lished Scotch saltworks — works so old that they were in ex- 
istence for centuries before the Scotch Salter had ceased to be 
a slave — are now engaged in crystallizing, not sea-water, as 
formerly, but rock-salt, from the midland counties of England. 
I picked up, about a twelvemonth ago, on a cart-road in the 
neighborhood of Prestonpans, a fragment of rock-salt, and then, 
a few yards nearer the town, a second fragment; and curious 
to know where the mineral could have come from, in a district 
that has none of its own, I went direct to one of the more 
ancient salt-works of the place to inquire. But the large 
reservoir of salt water attached to the works for supplying the 
boilers, and which communicates by a pipe with the profounder 
depths of the sea beyond, of itself revealed the secret. There, 
against one of the corners, lay a red, half-molten pile of the 
rock-salt of Cheshire; while the enveloping sea-water — of 
old the only source of the salt manufactured in the village — 
corstituted but a nere auxiliary source of supply, and a solvent. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 209 



CHAPTER XL 

Walk to the Clent Hills. — Incident in a Fruit Shop. — St. Kenelm's 
Chapel. — Legend of St. Kenelm. — Ancient Village of Clent; its Ap- 
pearance and Character. — View from the Clent Hills. — Mr. Thomas 
Moss. — Geologic Peculiarities of the Landscape; Illustration. — The 
Scotch Drift. — Boulders ; these transported by the Agency of Ice Floes. 
— Evidence of the Former Existence of a broad Ocean Channel. — The 
Geography of the Geologist. — Aspect of the Earth ever Changing. — 
Geography of the Palaeozoic Period ; of the Secondary ; of the Ter- 
tiary. — Ocean the great Agent of Change and Dilapidation. 

Let us now return to Hales Owen, and thence pass on to the 
Clent Hills, — famous resorts, in those parts, of many a sum- 
mer pic-nic party from the nearer villages, and of pale-faced 
artizans and over-labored clerks, broken loose for a few happy 
days from the din and smoke of the more distant Birmingham. 
I was fortunate in a pleasant day, — rather of the warmest for 
walking along the low, dusty roads, but sufficiently cool and 
breezy on the grassy slopes of the hills. A humble fruit-shop 
stood temptingly open among the naileries in the outer skirts 
of Hales Owen, and I stepped in to purchase a few pears : a 
sixpenceworth would have been by no means an overstock in 
Scotland to one who had to travel several miles up hill in a 
warm day; and so I asked for no less here. The fruitman 
began to fill a capacious oaken measure, much like what, in 
Scotland, we would term a meal lippy, and to pile up the Iruit 
over it in a heap. "How much is that?" I asked. — "Why, 
only fivepcnn'orth," replied the man ; " but I '11 give thee the 
other penn'orth arter." — " No, no, stop," said I ; " give me just 
18* 



210 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the half of fivepenn'orth ; you are much more liberal here than 
the fruit-dealers in my country ; and I find the half will be 
quite as much as I can manage." The incident reminded me 
of the one so good-humoredly related by Franklin. When 
fresh from Boston, where food was comparatively high, he went 
into a baker's shop in Philadelphia to purchase threepence 
worth of bread on which to breakfast, and received, to his as- 
tonishment, for the money, three huge loaves, two of which he 
had to carry through the streets stuck under his arms, while 
satiating his hunger to the full on the third. 

When little more than a mile out of town, I struck off the 
high road through a green lane, flanked on both sides by ex- 
tensive half-grown woods, and overhung by shaggy hedges, that 
were none the less picturesque from their having been long 
strangers to the shears, and much enveloped in climbing, berry- 
bearing plants, honeysuckles, brambles, and the woody night- 
shade. As the path winds up the acclivity, the scene assumes 
an air of neglected wildness, not very common in England : 
the tangled thickets rise in irregular groups in the foreground ; 
and, closing in the prospect behind, I could see through the 
frequent openings the green summits of the Clent Hills, now 
scarce half-a-mile away. I was on historic ground, — the "va- 
rious wild," according to Shenstone, "for Kenelm's fate re- 
nowned ; " and which, at a still earlier period, had formed one 
of the battle-fields on which the naked Briton contended on 
unequal terms with the mail-enveloped Eoman. Half-way up 
the ascent, at a turning in the lane, where the thicket opens 
into a grassy glade, there stands a fine old chapel of dark red 
sandstone, erected in the times of the Heptarchy, to mark the 
locale of a tragedy characteristic of the time, — the murder of 
the boy-king St. Ker.elm, at the instigation of his sister Ken- 
drida. I spent some time in tracing the half-obliterated carv- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 211 

ings on the squat Saxon door-way, — by far the most ancient 
part of the edifice, — and in straining hard to find some approx- 
imation to the human figure in the rude effigy of a child sculpt- 
ured on the wall, with a crown on its head and a book in its 
hand, intended, say the antiquaries, to represent the murdered 
prince, but at present not particularly like anything. The 
story of Kenelm we find indicated, rather than told, in one of 
Shenstone's elegies : — 

" Fast by the centre of yon various wild, 

Where spreading oaks embower a Gothic fane, 
Kendrida's arts a brother's youth beguiled ; 

There Nature urged her tenderest pleas in vain. 
Soft o'er his birth, and o'er his infant hours, 

The ambitious maid could every care employ; 
And with assiduous fondness crop the flowers, 

To deck the cradle of the princely boy. 

*' But soon the bosom's pleasing calm is flown ; 

Love fires her breast; the sultry passions rise; 
A favored lover seeks the Mercian throne, 

And views her Kenelm with a rival's eyes. 
See, garnished for the chase, the fraudful maid 

To these lone hills direct his devious way : 
The youth, all prone, the sister-guide obeyed; 

Ill-fated youth ! himself the destined prey." 

The minuter details of the incident, as given by William of 
Malmesbury and Matthew of Westminster, though admirably 
fitted for the purpose of the true ballad-maker, are of a kind 
which would hardly have suited the somewhat lumbrous dig- 
nity of Shenstone's elegiacs. Poor Kenelm, at the time of 
his death, was but nine years old. His murderer, the favored 
lover of his sister, after making all sure by cutting off his head 
with a long-bladed knife, had buried head, knife, and body, 
under a bush in a "low pasture" in the forest, and the earth 



212 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

concealed its dead. The deed, however, had scarce been per- 
petrated, when a white dove came flying into old St. Peters, 
at Rome, a full thousand miles away, bearing a scroll in its 
bill, and, dropping the scroll on the high altar, straightway 
disappeared. And on the scroll there was found inscribed in 
Saxon characters the following couplet : — 

" In Gent, in Caubage, Kenelm, kinge-born, 
Lyeth under a thorne, his hede off shorne." 

So marvellous an intimation, — miraculous, among its other 
particulars, in the fact, that rhyme of such angelic origin 
should be so very "bad, — though this part of the miracle the 
monks seem to have missed, — was, of course, not to be 
slighted. The Churchmen of Mercia were instructed by the 
pontiff to make diligent search after the body of the slain 
prince ; and priests, monks and canons, with the Bishop of 
Mercia at their head, proceeded forthwith in long procession 
to the forest. And there, in what Milton, in telling the story 
terms a " mead of kine," they found a cow lowing pitifully 
beside what seemed to be a newly-laid sod. The earth was 
removed, the body of the murdered prince discovered, the 
bells of the neighboring churches straightway began "to 
rongen a peale without mannes helpe ;" and a beautiful spring 
of water, the resort of many a pilgrim for full seven centuries 
after, burst out of the excavated hollow. The chapel was 
erected immediately beside the well; and such was the odor 
of sanctity which embalmed the memory of St. Kenelm, that 
there was no saint in the calendar on whose day it was more 
unsafe to do anything useful. There is a furrow still to be 
seen, scarce half a mile to the north of the chapel, from which 
a team of oxen, kept impiously at work during the festival of 
the sain', ran away, and were never after heard of; and the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 213 

owner lost not only his cattle, but, shortly after, his eyes to 
boot. The chapel received gifts in silver, and gifts in gold, — 
" croims," and " ceptres," and " chalysses : " there grew up 
around it, mainly through the resort of pilgrims, a hamlet, 
which, in the times of Edward the First, contained a numer- 
ous population, and to which Henry the Third granted an 
annual fair. At length the age of the Reformation arrived ; 
Henry the Eighth seized on the gold and silver ; Bishop Lat- 
imer broke down the well ; the pilgrimages ceased ; the ham- 
let disappeared; the fair, after lingering on till the year 1784, 
disappeared also; and St. Kenelm's, save that the ancient 
chapel still survived, became exactly such a scene of wild 
woodland solitude as it had been ere the boy-prince fell under 
the knife of the assassin. The drama of a thousand years 
was over when, some time about the close of the last century, 
a few workmen, engaged in excavating the foundations of the 
ruined monastery of Winchcomb, in which, according to the 
monkish chroniclers, the body of the young prince had been 
interred near that of his father, lighted on a little stone coffin, 
beside a larger, which lay immediately under the great eastern 
window of the church. They raised the lid. There rested 
within, a little dust, a few fragments of the more solid bones, 
a half-grown human skull tolerably entire, and beside the 
whole ; and occupying half the length of the little coffin, lay a 
long-bladed knife, converted into a brittle oxide, which fell in 
pieces in the attempt to remove it. The portion of the story 
that owed its existence to the monks had passed into a little 
sun-gilt vapor; but here was there evidence corroborative of 
its truthful nucleus surviving still. 

I reached the nearest summit in the Clent range, and found 
it an oblong grassy level, many acres in extent, bounded on 
the right by a secluded valley that opens among the hills, 



214 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

with a sma.. stream running- through it, The gieen slopes 
on both sides of the hollow, for half their heights, from the 
summits downwards, retain all their old irregularities of sur- 
face, unscarred by plough or harrow : a few green fields, and a 
few picturesque cottages environed by hedge-rows, with an 
old mill and mill-pond, occupy the lower declivities and the 
bottom ; and just where the valley opens into the level coun- 
try we find the little ancient village of Clent, one of the pret- 
tiest and most characteristic of all old English villages. It 
stands half enwrapped in tall wood, and half embraced by the 
outstretched arms of the valley, with its ancient, time-eaten 
church rising in the midst, like the central obelisk in a Druidic 
circle, and its old, venerable dwellings betimbered with dark oak 
and belatticed with lead, and much beshrouded in ivy and honey- 
suckle, scattered irregularly around. There were half-a-dozen 
children at play in the grass-grown street as I passed ; and a 
gentleman, who seemed the clergyman of the place, stood in 
earnest talk, at one of the cottage doors, with an aged matron 
in a black gown and very white cap ; but I saw no other in- 
habitants, and scarce any mark of more : no noisy workshops 
— no stir of business, — nothing doing, or like to be done. 
Clent, for the last nine hundred years, seems to have had 2 
wonderfully easy life of it, — an indolent, dreamy, uncaring 
summer-day sort of life. It was much favored by Edward 
the Confessor, as a curious charter, exempting its inhabitants 
from the payment of tolls at fairs, and from serving as jurors 
still survives to show ; and, regarding itself as a village fairly 
provided for, it seems to have thrust its hands into its pockets 
at the time, and to have kept them there ever since. Its wood- 
embosomed churchyard, as might be anticipated from its years, 
sesms vastly more populous than its cottages. According to 
tbs practice of this part of the country, the newer tombstones 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 215 

are all in deep black, and the lettering in gold; tne stcnes rise 
thick around the gray old church, half-concealing the sward ; 
and the sun, gleaming partially through openings in the tall 
trees, that run hedge-like round the whole, glistens here and 
there with a very agreeable effect on the bright letters. It 
would seem as if the tomb, less gloomy here than elsewhere, 
was smiling in hope, amid the general quiet. I had come 
down on the left-hand side of the valley to visit the village, 
which I now quitted by ascending the hill on the right, through 
long hollow lanes, rich in blackberries and ivy, and over which 
-ged trees shoot out their gnarled branches, roughly bearded 
with moss. The hill-top I found occupied, like that on the 
other side of the valley, by an uneven plain, covered by a short 
sward, and thinly mottled with sheep ; and all around to the 
dim horizon lay, spread out as in a map, the central districts 
of England. 

One half the prospect from this hill-top is identically that 
which Thomson described from the eminence over Hagley. 
There stretches away along the horizon a blue line of hills, 
from the Wrekin and the Welsh mountains on the north, to 
the steep Malverns and the hills that surround Worcester on 
the south. The other half of the prospect embraces the iron 
and coal districts, with their many towns and villages, their 
smelting furnaces, forges, steam-engines, tall chimneys, and 
pit-fires innumerable ; and beyond the whole lies the huge 
Birmingham, that covers its four square miles of surface with 
brick. No day, however bright and clear, gives a distinct 
landscape in this direction ; all is dingy and dark ; the iron 
furnaces vomit smoke night and noon, Sabbath-day and week- 
day ; and the thick reek rises ceaselessly to heaven, league be- 
yond league, like the sulphurous cloud of some never-ending 
battle. The local antiquary can point out, amid the 1 aze, a 



216 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

few scenes of historic and literary interest. Yonder church, 
due north, in the middle distance, that seems to lead so un- 
quiet and gloomy a life among the furnaces, — a true type of 
the Church militant, — had for its minister, many years ago, 
one Mr. Thomas Moss, who wrote, amid the smoke, a little 
poem known to every English reader, — " The Beggar's Peti- 
tion." In an opposite direction there may be seen, when the 
sun shines, an old building, in which the conspirator Garnet, 
whose head wrought miracles on the straw amid which it was 
cast,^ and several of the other Gunpowder Plot conspirators, 
secreted themselves for many days in a cavity in the wall. I 
have already referred to the scene of the old British battle, and 
of the assassination of St. Kenelm, both full in view; and to 
the literary recollections that linger around Hagley and the 
Leasowes, both full in view also. But the prospect is associ- 
ated with an immensely more ancient history than that of the 

* The miracle of the straw seems to have been considerably less remark- 
able than the belief in it. A young Jesuit-presumptive, attached to his 
reverend brother the " Martyr Garnet," had possessed himself, by way 
of relic, of one of the bloody ears of straw, stained by contact with the 
gory head, and stored it up in a bottle. Looking at it shortly after, he 
saw through the glass, on one of the chaff sheathes, the miniature sem- 
blance of a human head surrounded by a glory, and called on several of 
his co-religionists to admire the miracle. It was, however, unsafe in 
those days for Jesuits to work miracles in England. Tidings of the prod- 
igy got abroad ; law proceedings were instituted at the instance of the 
Privy Council ; and though straw, bottle and Jesuit, had prudently dis- 
appeared, witnesses were cited to give evidence in court regarding it ; 
among the rest, a painter named Bowen. And the painter's testimony 
was very amusing, and much to the point. He had seen the miniature 
head on the straw, he said ; there could be no doubt of that ; but then he 
had quite as little doubt that he could make as good, or even a better 
head, on an ear of straw, himself. And such was the miracle on the 
faith of which it was held that either Garnet was innocent of the Gun- 
powder Plot, or the Gunpowder Plot laudable in itself. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 217 

days of the Romans or of the Heptarchy, and with a literature 
considerably more modern than that of Lord Lyttelton or Mr. 
Moss ; and it is on this more ancient history, as recorded in 
this more modern literature, that I shall attempt fixing the 
attention of the reader. "When Signor Sarti exhibits his ana- 
tomical models, he takes up one cover after another, — first the 
skin, then the muscles, then the viscera, then the greater 
blood-vessels and deeper nerves, — until at length the skeleton 
.is laid bare. Let us, in the same way, strip the vast landscape 
here of its upper integuments, coat after coat, beginning first 
with the vegetable mould, — the scarf-skin of the country, — 
wherein its beauty lies, with all its fields and hedge-rows, 
houses and trees ; and proceed downwards, cover after cover, 
venturing a few remarks on the anatomy of each covering as 
we go, till we reach those profound depths which carry within 
their blank folds no record of their origin or history. 

The vegetable mould is stripped away, with all its living 
inhabitants, animal and vegetable; man himself has disap- 
peared, with all that man has built or dug, erected or excavat- 
ed ; and the vast panorama, far as the eye can reach, presents 
but a dreary wilderness of diluvial clays and gravels, with here 
a bare rock sticking through, and there a scattered group of 
boulders. Now mark a curious fact. The lower clays and 
gravels in this desert are chiefly of local origin; they are 
formed mainly of the rock on which they rest. These quartz 
pebbles, for instance, so extensively used in this part of the 
country in causewaying footways, were swept out of the mag- 
nesian conglomerate of the Loiver New Red ; these stiff clays 
are but re-formations of the saliferous marls of the Upper 
Red; these darkened gravels are derived from the neighbor- 
ing coal-field ; and yonder gray, mud-colored stratum, mixed 
up with fragments of limestone, is a deposit from the rather 
19 



218 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

more distant Silurians. But not such the character of the 
widely-spread upper stratum, with its huge granitic boulders. 
We may see within the range of the landscape whence all the 
lower beds have come from ; but no powers of vision could 
enable us to descry whence the granitic boulders and gravels 
have come from. Strange as the circumstance may seem, 
they are chiefly Scotch, — travellers, in the remote past, from 
the granitic rocks of Dumfries xnd Kirkcudbright. They lie 
amid sea-shells of the existing species, — the common oyster, 
the edible cockle and periwinkle, island-cyprina, rock-whelk 
(purpura lapillus), and a host of others of the kind we may 
any day pick on our shores. Now mark the story which 
they tell. This region of central England was once a broad 
ocean sound, that ran nearly parallel to St. George's Channel ; 
there rose land on both sides of it : "Wales had got its head 
above water; so had the Cotteswold Hills in Gloucestershire; 
and not a particle of the Scotch drift is to be found on either 
side, where the ancient land lay. But the drift marks the 
entire course of the central channel, lying thick in Lancashire, 
Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Worcestershire, in some localities 
to the depth of a hundred and fifty feet. And in its present 
elevation it averages in its course from fifty to five hundred 
feet over the existing sea. This ancient sound seems to have 
narrowed towards the south, where it joined on to the Bristol 
Channel ; "but such was its breadth where we now stand, that 
the eye would have failed to discover the eastern shore. Its 
waves beat against the Malverns on the one side, and the Cot- 
teswold Hills on the other ; it rose high along the flanks of the 
Wrekin ; the secluded dells of Hagley were but the recesses of 
a submarine rock, shaggy with seaweed, that occupied its cen- 
tral tide-way ; while the Severn, exclusively a river of Wales 
in those days, emptied its waters into the sea at the Breidden 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 219 

Hills in Montgomeryshire, a full hundred miles from where it 
now falls into the Bristol Channel. Along this broad sound, 
every spring, when the northern ice began to break up, — for its 
era was that of the British glacier and iceberg, — huge ice-floes 
came drifting in shoals from the Scottish coast, loaded under- 
neath with the granitic blocks which they had enveloped when 
forming in friths and estuaries ; and, as they floated along, the 
loosened boulders dropped on the sea-bottom beneath. Here lie 
scores in the comparatively still water, and there lie hundreds 
where the conflicting tides dashed fierce and strong. "In the 
tract extending from the hamlet of Trescot to the village of 
Trysull, in the south-western parts of Staffordshire," says Sir 
Roderick Murchison, " the quantity, and occasionally gigantic 
dimensions, of these northern boulders (several tons in weight) 
may well excite surprise, seeing that they there occupy one of 
the most central districts of England. Here the farmer is 
incessantly laboring to clear the soil, either by burying them, 
or by piling them up into walls or hedge-banks ; and his toil, 
like that of Sisyphus, seems interminable ; for in many spots 
new crops of them, as it were, appear as fast as the surface is 
relieved from its sterilizing burden. So great, indeed, is their 
abundance, that an observer unacquainted with the region 
would feel persuaded he was approaching the foot of some vast 
granitic range ; and yet the source of their origin is one hun- 
dred and fifty miles distant." 

There are few things that speak more powerfully to the 
imagination of the geologist than the geography of his science. 
It seems natural to man to identify the solid globe which he 
inhabits by its great external features, particularly by its pecu- 
liar arrangement of continent and ocean. We at once recog- 
nize it in the prints of our popular astronomical treatises, as 
seen from the moon, or through the telescope from some of ihe 



220 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

more dista .it planets, by the well-known disposition of its land 
and water; and were that disposition made greatly different in 
the representation, we would at once fail to regard it as the 
earth on which we ourselves reside. It might be some of the 
other planets, we would say, but not ours. And yet these 
great features are exceedingly evanescent, compared with the 
enduring globe which they diversify and individualize, — mere 
changing mist-wreaths on the surface of an unchanging firma- 
ment. The up-piled clouds of one sunset, all gorgeous with 
their tints of bronze and fire, are not more diverse, in place, 
arrangement and outline, from the streaked and mottled cloud- 
lets of another, radiant in their hues of gold and amber, than 
the lands and oceans of any one great geologic system, from 
the lands and oceans of the system that had preceded or come 
after it. Every geologic era has had a geography of its own. 
The earth, like a child's toy, that exhibits a dozen different 
countenances peeping out in succession from under the same 
hood, has presented with every revolution a new face. The 
highest lands of Asia and continental Europe formed ocean- 
beds in the times of the Oolite : the highest lands of our own 
country were swam over by the fish of the Old Ked Sandstone. 
There is much to exercise the imagination in facts such as 
these, whether one views in fancy the planet as a whole, ever 
changing its aspect amid the heavens, or calls up more in 
detail the apparition of vanished states of things amid existing 
scenes of a character altogether diverse, — buried continents, 
for instance, on the blue open sea, or long evanished oceans 
far inland, amid great forests and mighty hills. I can well 
understand the feeling experienced by Dr. Friedrich Parrot, as 
he travelled day after day in his journey to Ararat along the 
^lat banks of the Manech, and saw in the salt marshes and 
brine lakes of the district irrefragable evidence that a great 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 221 

inland sea, of which the Caspian and the Sea of Aral are but 
minute fragments, — mere detached pools, left amid the gen- 
eral ebb, — had once occupied that vast central basin of Asia 
into which the Volga and the Oxus fall. He was ever realiz- 
ing to himself — and deriving much quiet enjoyment from the 
process — a time when a sea without visible shore occupied, 
league beyond league, the surrounding landscape, and picturing 
in fancy the green gleam of the waves, interposed, cloud-like, 
between him and the sun. Very similar must be the feelings 
of the voyager on the great Pacific. We find trace in this 
ocean of a sinking continent, — a continent once of greater area 
than all Europe, — in the act of foundering, with but merely 
its mast-heads above the water. Great coral reefs that whiten 
the green depths league after league and degree after degree, 
for hundreds and thousands of miles, with here and there a tall 
mountain-peak existing as a surf-engirdled island, are all that 
remain to show where a " wide continent bloomed," that had 
existed as such myriads of ages after the true geologic Atlantis 
had been engulfed. 

It seems more than questionable whether we shall ever 
arrive at a knowledge approximating to correct, regarding the 
distribution of ocean and continent in the earlier, or even sec- 
ondary geologic formations. The Silurian and Old Red Sand- 
stone systems give but few indications of land at all. and cer- 
tainly no indications whatever of its place or extent. The 
Coal Measures, on the other hand, puzzle with the multiplicity 
of their alternations of land and water, --in some instances, 
of sea and land. We know little more than that an ocean- 
deposit forms very generally the base of the system, and that 
the deep bottom occupied by the sea came afterwards to be a 
platform, on which great forests sprang up and decayed ; and 
that amid the broken stumps of these forests, when again sub- 
19* 



222 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

merged, the Iloloptychins and Megalickthys disported. The 
same sort of obscurity hangs over the geography of the New 
Red Sandstone : we but know that land and water there were, 
from finding, wrapped up in the strata, the plants and reptiles 
of the one, and the fish and shells of the other. A few insu- 
lated facts dawn upon us in the Oolite. We ascertain that the 
Jurasic Alps formed in those early times the bottom of the sea, 

— nay, that the cuttle-fish discharged its ink, and the ammon- 
ite reared its sail, over the side of the gigantic Himalaya 
range ; whereas, from the disposition of the Oolitic patches on 
ooth the eastern and western coasts of Scotland, it seems at 
least probable that in that remote period this ancient country, 

— " Old Scotland," — had got its head and shoulders above 
water. From the Weald we merely learn that a great river 
entered the sea somewhere near what now forms the south of 
England or north of France, — a river which drained the 
waters of some extensive continent, that occupied, it is proba- 
ble, no small portion of the space now covered up by the Atlan- 
tic. It is not at all impossible that the long trails of sea-weed, 
many fathoms in length, which undulate in mid ocean to the 
impulses of the Gulf Stream, and darken the water over an area 
hundreds of miles in extent, are anchored beneath, to what 
once formed the Rocky Mountains of this submerged America. 
The Cretaceous system, as becomes its more modern origin, 
tells a somewhat more distinct story. It formed the bed of a 
great ocean, which extended from central England to at least 
the shores of the Red Sea, and included within its area consid- 
erable portions of France, Spain, Italy, Dalmatia, Albania, and 
the Morea, — a considerable part of Syria, as indicated in the 
ichthyolitic strata of Lebanon, — and large tracts of the great 
valley of Egypt, as shown by the nummulitic limestone of the 
pyramids. But the geography of these older formations, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 223 

whether Palaeozoic or Secondary, cannot be other than imper- 
fect. Any one system, as shown on the geologic map, is but a 
thing of shreds and patches. Here it occurs as a continuous 
belt, — there as a detached basin, — yonder as an insulated 
outlier ; and it is only on these shreds and patches that the 
geography of each system can be traced, when we can trace it 
at all. The field of the map in each instance resembles one 
of those dilapidated frescoes of Pompeii, in which by much the 
greater part of the plaster has fallen from the wall, and we can 
trace but broken fragments of the picture on the detached bits 
that remain. The geologic geographer finds himself in the cir- 
cumstances of the cod-fishing skipper, who, in going one day, 
when crossing the Atlantic, to consult his charts, found them 
reduced to detached tatters, and came on deck in a paroxysm 
of consternation, to tell his crew that they might put about 
ship when they pleased, for the rats had eaten Newfoundland. 
With the dawn of the Tertiary ages the fragments greatly 
extend, and tolerably adequate notions of the arrangements of 
land and water over wide areas may be formed.^ The reader 

*One of the most ingenious pieces of geologic geography to he any- 
where met with in the literature of the science, may be found in Mr. 
Charles Maclaren's well-known " Sketch of the Geology of Fife and the 
Lothians." It occurs as part of a theory of the diluvial phenomena of 
" Crag and Tail," and appeals with equal effect to the reason and imag- 
ination of the reader. " If there has been a good deal of denudation on 
the east side of Scotland," says Mr. Maclaren, "there has been much 
more on the west. The absence of sand-banks on the west coast ; the 
greater depth of the ocean there ; the numerous and profound indenta- 
tions of the land, in the shape of bays, estuaries, and lakes ; the rocky 
islands, which had once been parts of the mainland ; the removal of so 
large a part of the red sandstone of Ross and Sutherland, which had once 
covered a hundred miles of the western coast to the depth of two or three 
thousand feet, and is now reduced to a few isolated cones, — all these 
fiicts, with the familiar examples of Crag and Tail, indicate that the sur- 
£ice of Scotland has been swept by powerful denuding currents coming 



224 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

must have seen LyelPs map of Europe, as Europe existed in 
the Eocene period, — a map constructed mainly on the geologic 
data of M. A. Boue. The land which it exhibits exists as 

from the west. The west coast of England and Ireland also exhibits deep 
indentations in high rocky land. We find the same appearances in a less 
marked degree on the coast of Normandy and Brittany in France, and 
on a stilt smaller scale upon the west coasts of Spain and Portugal. The 
west coast of Norway is one long line of islands, promontories, and deep 
fiords, — showing that the primary rocks, in spite of their hardness, 
have been breached in a thousand places by powerful currents. The 
western coasts of Denmark, Holland and Belgium, haying the British 
Isles before them as a breakwater, have few indentations, except where 
laid open by the rivers. An effect so general should have a general 
cause, and perhaps physical geography may afford a clue to it. If the 
land rose in detached portions, and by successive lifts, from the sea, we 
may suppose that there was a time when the surface of the globe consisted 
of a great expanse of ocean studded with islands. Such Adolphe Brongn- 
iart svipposes its condition to have been, at least in Europe, when the 
Coal Measures were deposited. In this state of things there would be 
three great and constant currents, — one within the tropics, running 
westward ; and two running eastward between the tropics and the poles. 
The trade-winds in the torrid zone, and the prevailing westerly winds in 
the extra-tropical regions, would alone account for these currents. But 
to these causes must be added the southward course of an under-current, 
from the pole, of cold water, with a low velocity of revolution, and the 
northward course of an upper current, from the equator, of warm water, 
with a high velocity of revolution. The first would become a westerly 
current when it reached the tropics, and the second an easterly cur- 
rent when it reached the temperate zone. Such would be the state of 
an open ocean from the equator to the north pole ; and, mutatis mutandis, 
the same description applies to the southern hemisphere. All the three 
currents, in truth, exist at this day, but enfeebled and metamorphosed 
by the transverse position of the two great continents. Now, if these cur- 
rents were acting permanently, and with the force which they would have 
if little obstructed, their operation, when tracts of land rose above the 
sea, would be thus : — They would form deep indentations on the east side 
of intertropical, and on the west side of extratropical lands ; and, when 
acting in very favorable circumstances, would form islands, by making 
breaches through continents, or separating their prominent parts. The 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 225 

detached groups of islands. There is, first, the British group, 
little different in form and extent from what it is now, save 
that the south-eastern corner of England is cut off diagonally, 
from the Wash to the Isle of Wight ; next the Swedish and 
Norwegian group, consisting mainly of one great island : and 
then a still larger group than either, scattered over the existing 
area of France, Southern Austria, part of Turkey in Europe, 
and part of Italy. Running through the midst, there is a broad 
ocean sound, that stretches across, where it opens into the Ger- 
man Sea, from Norway to Dover, and that then expands in 
breadth, and sweeps eastwards, — covering in its course the beds 
of the Black and the Caspian Seas, — into the great Asiatic ba- 
sin. And in this Europe of shreds and fragments, — of detached 
clusters of islets, with broad ocean channels flowing between, 

boundary between the opposite currents would be between the latitudes 
of 28° and 30°, where a zone of still water would exist ; and their maxi- 
mum eifort would be near the equator, and within the polar circle. When 
the land was rising, and near the surface of the water, or partially above 
it, the currents would produce the phenomena of Crag and Tail. The 
crag or head would point to the east within the tropics, and to the west 
in the temperate regions. The current would of course not flow invaria- 
bly in one precise direction, but be occasionally deflected by high lands to 
the north or south of its true direction. We must keep in mind also, that 
though not perhaps very strong, it would be constant ; and that transi- 
tory storms and hurricanes would generally incorporate themselves with 
it, and augment its force. A temporary current evidently would not 
explain the facts. If the same agent swept away the solid rocks which 
once environed and covered Arthur's Seat and North Berwick Law, and 
also deposited the tail of clay and gravel lying behind these mountains, it 
must have acted for thousands of years. But it is more probable that 
there were two or more currents at distant epochs. Perhaps New Hol- 
land, New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines, and Spice Islands, may be 
the remnants of what was once the southern prolongation of the Asiatic 
continent, and which had been breached and divided by the tropical cur- 
rent before Africa and South America rose from the deep to arrest its free 
course. The idea, however, is thrown out merely as a conjecture on a 
subject requiring much additional investigation." 



226 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

— the strange existences described by Cuvier enjoyed life dur- 
ing the earlier ages of the Tertiary. As we descend towards 
the pressnt state of things, and lands and seas approximate to 
their existing relations, the geographic data become more 
certain. One side of the globe has, we find, its vanishing 
continent, — the other its disappearing ocean. The northern 
portion of our own country presents almost the identical outline 
which the modern geographer transfers to his atlas, save that 
there is here and there a narrow selvage clipped off and given 
to the sea, and that while the loftier headlands protrude as far 
as now into the ocean, the friths and bays sweep further inland: 
but in the southern part of the island the map is greatly differ- 
ent ; a broad channel sweeps onwards through the middle of 
the land ; and the Highlands of Wales, south and north, exist 
as a detached, bold-featured island, placed half-way between 
the coasts of England and Ireland. I found it exceedingly 
pleasant to lie this day on the soft short sward, and look down 
through the half-shut eye, as the clouds sailed slowly athwart 
the landscape, on an apparition of this departed sea, now in sun- 
shine, now in shadow. Adventurous keel had never ploughed 
it, nor had human dwelling arisen on its shores ; but I could see, 
amid its deep blue, as the light flashed out amain, the white 
gleam of wings around the dark tumbling of the whale and the 
grampus : and now, as the shadows rested on it dim and 
sombre, a huge shoal of ice-floes came drifting drearily from the 
north, — the snow-laden rack brushing their fractured summits, 
and the stormy billows chafing angrily below. 

Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, 
or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neigh- 
boring wood? 0, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent 
since time first began, — where has it not been uttered ! There 
is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 227 

no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan 
plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and 
the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, 
and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his 
sands that the winds heap up ; and it is the skeleton remains 
of his vassals — shells, and fish, and the stony coral — that the 
rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall moun- 
tain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting 
lungs labor to inhale the thin bleak air, — where no insect 
murmurs and no bird flies, — and where the eye wanders over 
multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests 
that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow 
valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, 
and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The effigies 
of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, 
where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist-wreath ; and 
his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending 
slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been, — the de- 
vourer of continents, — the blue foaming dragon, whose voca- 
tion it is to eat up the land ? His ice-floes have, alike furrowed 
the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion ; 
and his nummulites and fish lie imbedded in great stones of 
the pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in 
rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as 
Ocean exists there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change ; 
and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, 
motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, 
to awaken no more, — and should the sea still continue to 
impel its currents and to roll its waves, — every continent and 
island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, " when 
the fountains of the great deep were broken up," 

" A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe." 



228 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognized, 
that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the 
tenovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and 
eternal, that " there shall be no more sea " ? or are we to regard 
the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic — the pictured shape 

— of some analogous moral truth ? " Reasoning from what we 
know," — and what else remains to us ? — an earth without a 
sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without 
life, — a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the 
telescope reveals to us in the moon. And yet the Ocean does 
seem peculiarly a creature of time, — of all the great agents of 
vicissitude and change, the most influential and untiring; and 
to a state in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change, 

— in which the earthquakes shall not heave from beneath, nor 
the mountains wear down and the continents melt away, — it 
seems inevitably necessary that there should be " no more sea." 

But, carried away by the speculation, I lag in my geological 
survey. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 229 



CHAPTER XII. 

Geological Coloring of the Landscape. — Close Proximity in this Neigh- 
borhood of the various Geologic Systems. — The Oolite ; its Medicinal 
Springs ; how formed. — Cheltenham. — Strathpeffer. — The Saliferous 
System ; its Organic Remains and Foot-prints. — Record of Curious 
Passages in the History of the Earlier Reptiles. — Salt Deposits. — 
Theory. — The Abstraction of Salt from the Sea on a large Scale prob- 
ably necessary to the continued Existence of its Denizens. — Lower 
New Red Sandstone. — Great Geologic Revolution. — Elevation of the 
Trap. — Hills of Clent ; Era of the Elevation. — Coal Measures ; their 
three Forests in the Neighborhood of Wolverhampton. — Comparatively 
small Area of the Birmingham Coal-field. — Vast Coal-fields of the 
United States. — Berkeley's Prophecy. — Old Red Sandstone. —Silurian 
System. — Blank. 

Let us now raise from off the landscape another integument, 
— let us remove the boulder clays and gravels, as we formerly 
removed the vegetable mould, and lay the rock everywhere 
bare. There is no longer any lack of color in the prospect ; 
it resembles, on the contrary, a map variously tinted by the 
geographer, to enable the eye to trace his several divisions, 
natural or arbitrary. The range of trap-hills which furnishes 
our peak of survey is of a deep olive-green; the New Red 
Sandstone that spreads out so widely around it, of a bright 
brick-red. There is a coal-field on either hand, — the barren 
field of the Forest of Wyre, and the singularly productive field 
of Dudley ; and they both are irregularly checkered black, yel- 
low, and gray. Beyond the Wyre field lies an immense district 
of a deep chocolate-red tint, — a huge development of the Old 
Red Sandstone. Still further beyond, we may discern in the 
distance a bluish-gray province of great extent, much broken 
20 



230 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

into hills, which consists of an at least equally huge develop- 
ment of the Silurian ; while, rising over the red saliferous marls 
in an opposite direction, we may see a series of flat, low-lying 
rocks of the Oolitic system, passing from a pale neutral tint 
into a smoky brown and a light straw-yellow. In such close 
proximity are the geological systems in this part of the country, 
that the geologist who passes the night in Birmingham on the 
Lower New Ked Sandstone, may go and take an early break- 
fast on the Silurian, the Old Red, the Carboniferous, the Salif- 
erous, or the Oolitic systems, just as he inclines. Good sections, 
such as our northern sea-coasts furnish, are all that are wanting 
to render the locality one of the finest in the kingdom to the 
student of the stony science : but these he misses sadly ; and 
he, alas ! cannot deal with the stubborn integuments of the 
country in reality, as we are dealing with them so much at our 
ease in imagination, on one of the summits of the Clent Hills. 

The integument that falls to be examined first in order, after 
the boulder drift and the gravels, is the Oolitic one; but it 
occupies merely a corner on the verge of the horizon, and need 
not engage us long. One remark regarding it, however, though 
rendered familiar to the geologic reader by the writings of 
Murchison and Mantell, I shall venture to repeat. We have 
seen how this central district of the kingdom has its storehouses 
of coal, iron, salt, lime, — liberal donations to the wants of the 
human animal, from the Carboniferous, Saliferous, and Silurian 
systems; and to these we must now add its inexhaustible 
deposits of medicine, — contributions to the general stock by the 
Oolitic system. Along the course of the Lias, medicinal springs 
abound ; there is no other part of England where they rise so 
thickly, or of a quality that exerts a more powerful influence 
on the human frame. The mineral waters of Cheltenham, for 
instance, so celebrated for their virtues, are of the number ; and 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 231 

the way in which they are elaborated in such vast quantities 
seems to be simply as follows : — They all rise in the Lias, — 
a formation abounding in sulphate of iron, lime, magnesia, 
lignite, and various bituminous matters ; but they have their 
origin far beneath, in the saliferous marls of the Upper New 
Red, which the Lias overlies. In the inferior formation they 
are simply brine springs : but brine is a powerful solvent ; pass- 
ing through the Lias, it acts upon the sulphur and the iron ; 
becomes, by means of the acid thus set free and incorporated 
with it, a more powerful solvent still ; operates upon the lime, 
upon the magnesia, upon the various lignites and bitumens ; 
and at length rises to the surface, a brine-digested extract of 
Liasic minerals. The several springs yield various analyses, 
according to the various rocks of the upper formation which 
they pass through, — some containing more, some less lime, 
sulphur, iron, magnesia ; but in all the dissolving menstruum 
is the same. And such, it would appear, is the mode in which 
Nature prepares her simples in this rich district, and keeps her 
medicine-chest ever full. 

Let us trace the progress of a single pint of the water thus 
elaborated, from where it first alights on the spongy soil in a 
wintry shower, till where it sparkles in the glass in the pump- 
room at Cheltenham. It falls among the flat hills that sweep 
around the ancient city of Worcester, and straightway buries 
itself, all fresh and soft, in the folds of the Upper New Red 
Sandstone, where they incline gently to the east. It percolates, 
in its downward progress, along one of the unworkable seamb 
of rock-salt that occur in the superior marls of the formation ; 
and, as it pursues, furlong after furlong, its subterranean jour- 
ney, savors more and more strongly of the company it keeps ; 
becomes in succession hard, brackish, saline, briny ; and then 
many fathoms below the level at which it had entered, escapes 



232 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

from the sa iferous stratum, tnrough a transverse fissure, into 
an inferior Liasic bed. And here it trickles, for many hundred 
yards, through a pyritiferous shale, on which its biting salts act 
so powerfully, that it becomes strongly tinctured by the iron 
oxide, and acidulated by the sulphur. And now it forces its 
upward way through the minute crevices of a dolomitic lime- 
stone, which its salts and acids serve partially to decompose ; 
so that to its salt, iron and sulphur, it now adds its lime and 
its magnesia. And now it flows through beds of organic 
remains, animal and vegetable, — now through a stratum of 
belemnites, and now a layer of fish, — now beside a seam of 
lignite, and now along a vein of bitumen. Here it carries 
along with it a dilute infusion of what had been once the mus- 
cular tissue of a crocodile, and here the strainings of the bones 
of an ichthyosaurus. And now it comes gushing to the light 
in an upper Liasic stratum, considerably higher in the geologic 
scale than the saliferous sandstones into which it had at first 
sunk, but considerably lower with reference to the existing 
levels. And now take it and drink it off at once, without 
pause or breathing space. It is not palatable, and it smells 
villanously ; but never did apothecary mix up a more curiously- 
compounded draught ; and if it be not as salutary as it is elab- 
orate, the faculty are sadly in error. 

The underground history of the mineral springs of Great 
Britain would form an exceedingly curious chapter. I visited, 
a few weeks since, the springs at Strathpeffer, and explored, as 
carefully as rather imperfect sections and rather limited time 
permitted, the geology of the valley. The lower hills that 
rise around it are composed of the great conglomerate base of 
the Old Red Sandstone system. The denudation of ages has 
swept every trace of the superior strata from their sides and 
summits; but in the sheltered trough of the valley at least one 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 233 

of the overlying beds has escaped. We find laid at length 
along the hollow bottom, like a pancake in a platter, the lower 
ichthyolitic bed of the formation, so rich in other parts of the 
country in animal remains, but which exists in this locality as 
a gray brecciated rock, devoid of visible fossils, but so largely 
saturated with the organic matter into which they have been 
resoh 3d, that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable 
dust set loose affects very sensibly the organs of taste, and 
appeals scarce less strongly to those of smell than the swine- 
stones of England. And it is through this saturated bed that 
the mineral waters take their course. Even the upper springs 
of the valley, as they pass over it, contract, in a sensible degree, 
its peculiar taste and odor. The dweller on the sea-coast is 
struck, on entering the pump-room, by the familiarity of the 
powerful smell which fills the place. It is that of a muddy 
sea-bottom when uncovered by the ebb. He finds that, what- 
ever else may have changed within the rock since the times of 
the Lower Old Red Sandstone, the scent of the ancient ooze 
of this system is exactly what it ever was ; and he dri/iks the 
water, convinced, if a geologist, that if man did not come early 
enough in the day to breakfast on the fish of the Old Red, — 
Acanthodiens, Dipteriens, Coccostei, and Pterichthyes, — he haj 
at least come quite in time enough to gulp down as medicine 
an infusion of their juices and their bones. 

We strip off the Liasic integument, "as ye peel the fig when 
its fruit is fresh;" and it is with the Upper New Red forma- 
tion, on which the Lias rests, — its saliferous marls and vast 
beds of rock-salt, — that we have now to deal. There occurs 
among the superior strata of the formation a bed of variously- 
colored sandstone, of little depth, but great horizontal extent, 
remarkable for containing, what in England at least is compar- 
atively rare in the New Red, organic remains. We find it 
2Q* 



234 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

chiefly characterized by an inequilateral bivalve, not larger 
than a small pea, which conchologists term the Posidonomya ; 
and by the teeth and ichthyodorulites of fishes : on the surface, 
too, of some of its ripple-marked slabs, curious records lie 
inscribed of the doings of the earlier reptiles. On one large 
slab in the Warwick Museum, figured by Sir .Roderick Mur- 
chison, we may see the footprints of some betailed batrachian, 
that went waddling along, greatly at its leisure, several hun- 
dred thousand years ago, like the sheep of the nursery rhyme, 
" trailing its tail behind it." There is a double track of foot- 
prints on the flag, — those of the right and left feet : in the 
middle, between the two, lies the long groove formed by the 
tail, — a groove continuous, but slightly zig-zagged, to indicate 
the waddle. The creature half-way in its course lay down to 
rest, having apparently not much to do, and its abdomen formed 
a slight hollow in the sand beneath. In again rising to its 
feet, it sprawled a little ; and the hinder part of its body, in 
getting into motion, fretted the portion of the surface that fur- 
nished the main fulcrum of the movement, into two wave-like 
curves. The marks on another slab of the same formation 
compose such a notice of the doings of one of the earlier che- 
lonians as a provincial editor would set into type for his news- 
paper, were the reptile My Lord Somebody, his patron. The 
chelonian journeyed adown a moist sandy slope, furrowed by 
ripple-markings, apparently to a watering-place. He travelled 
leisurely, as became a reptile of consequence, set down his full 
weight each step he took, and left a deep-marked track in 
double line behind him. And yet, were his nerves less strong, 
he might have bestirred himself; for the southern heavens were 
dark with tempest at the time, and a thunderous-like shower, 
scarce a mile away, threatened to wet him to the skin. On it 
came : and the large round drops, driven aslant by a gale from 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 235 

the south, struck in + o the sand like small shot, at an angle of 
sixty. How the traveller fared on the occasion has not trans- 
pired ; but clear and palpable it is that he must have been a 
firm fellow, and that the heavy globular drops made a much less 
marked impression on the sand consolidated by his tread, than 
when they fell elsewhere on the incoherent surface around him. 
Such are two of the curious old-world stories recorded on this 
upper bed of New Eed Sandstone ; and there are many more 
of the same class. A lower bed of light-colored stone occupies 
ihe base of the saliferous system, forming its pavement, and 
separating it from the inferior New Red. And this bed has 
also its organisms, chiefly vegetable, — flabelliform palm-leaves, 
— narrow, slender spikes, resembling those of the grasses, — 
and a peculiarly formed ear-like cone or catkin, termed the 
echinostachys. And these constitute some of the earliest 
remains known to the geologist of a flora specifically different 
from that of the Coal Measures. Interposed between this 
pavement and the fossiliferous sandstone band above, there 
occurs a vast thickness of saliferous marls, interstratified with 
those enormous beds of rock-salt, continuous over wide areas, 
in which all the salt-mines of England have been excavated, 
and which now forces upon us, a second time, the problem of 
the saliferous deposits. The wind-bound ship-ma^er, detained 
in port long after the specified day of sailing, takta instruments 
in the hands of a legal official, and, " protesting against the 
weather," frees himself from all risk of prosecution from pas- 
senger or supercargo. I have already, in like manner, entered 
my protest against the difficulties which environ this subject ; 
and shall now launch into it, shielded by the document against 
the responsibility of failure, or the odium consequent on enter- 
ing a wrong port. 

If in the existing state of things we seek for phenomena 



236 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

similar in kind to those which produced the Coal Measures, we 
shall not be disappointed ; but we shall be greatly disappointed 
if we seek for phenomena not only similar in kind, but also 
equal in power. An American swamp or a Scotch morass 
gives us but the equivalent of a single thin seam of coal ; a 
submarin3 peat-moss, based on a layer of vegetable mould, and 
topped by a bed of sea-sand, the equivalent merely of a single 
thin seam, resting on an earthy shale, and overlaid by a shelly 
sandstone. Swamp, morass, submerged peat-moss, nay, even 
if we add to these some river delta, which, like that of the 
Mississippi, receives the spoils of a wide forest-covered conti- 
nent, are but slender representatives of even our Scottish coal- 
field, with its three hundred and eighty-seven successive beds, 
of which eighty-four are seams of coal. We must be content, 
in our illustrations drawn from the present scene of things, 
with phenomena similar in kind, without looking for aught 
corresponding in extent. Even had we now the Carboniferous 
vegetation, the stifT and rigid earth, grown old, would not 
exhibit the ever-recurring sinkings, with occasional risings, of 
surface, which buried the lower beds of the Carboniferous sys- 
tem full four thousand feet beneath its upper deposits. Now, 
in dealing with the Saliferous system, let us content ourselves, 
as in dealing with the Coal Measures, with simply illustrating 
the foregone phenomena by phenomena of the existing state of 
things apparently similar in kind, though palpably dissimilar in 
extent and degree. Let us take for granted, as we do in the 
case of the Carboniferous period, a comparatively flexible state 
of the earth's crust, — frequent sinkings of the surface, with 
occasional risings and progressive depositions of matter, that 
keep pace with the general subsidence. And let us then refer 
to some of the salt formations of the present time, as illustra- 
tive of the way in which, amid greatly more active energies of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 237 

nature, vastly more enormous deposits of this mineral came to 
oe formed; just as our writers on the Coal Measures refer, on 
a similar understanding, to existing swamps and mosses. 

We are told by Major Harris, in his " Highlands of Ethio- 
pia," that when on his journey, he reached, with his party, 
near the Abyssinian frontier, a desert valley, occupied by a salt 
lake, the Bahr Assal, which forms a prolongation of the Gulf 
of Tadjura. A broad bar of lava had cut off its waters from 
those of the gulf; and, fed by no rivers, and exposed in a burn- 
ing climate to the unmitigated rays of the sun, intensified by 
reflection from hot rocky mountains, they had shrunk into " an 
elliptical basin, seven miles in its transverse axis, half-filled 
with smooth water of the deepest cerulean hue, and half with 
a solid sheet of glittering, snow-white salt, the offspring of 
evaporation." Here, at least, was one extensive bed of salt in 
the forming ; nor is it difficult to conceive how : the work of 
evaporation completed, and the entire lake rendered a white, 
solid mass, some general sinking of the surface continued, till 
the waves of the outer gulf toppled for a time over the lava 
bar, and then, succeeded, as such sinkings so often were dur- 
ing the Carboniferous period, by a slight elevatory movement, 
might give to it a second supply of brine with which to double 
its thickness. We find no lava bars in the saliferous sand- 
stone ; but sand-bars raised by the surf on a flat arenaceous 
coast during a slow and equable sinking of the surface, would 
meet the emergencies of our theory less clumsily, and better. 
Let us conceive, then, along a range of flat coast extending 
from the northern parts of Lancashire to the Bristol Channel, a 
chain of lagoons, some of lesser, some of larger extent, and 
separated from the main sea by sand spits or bars raised by 
the surf; let us suppose the climate to be at least as warm as 
that on. the African shore cf the Red Sea, in which the salt of 



238 FIRST IMPRESSIONS CF 

the Bihr Assal is forming ; let us imagine a subsidence of the 
land going on so exceedingly slow and gradual as to be counter- 
balanced by the deposition of earthy matter taking place in the 
sea on the one hand, — by the crystallization of the salt in the 
lagoons, fed by occasional supplies of salt water, on the other, 
— and by the rise of the bar, ever operated upon by the surf, 
in the line between. A paroxysm of sudden subsidence would, 
of course, bring the formation of the salt-bed to a close, and 
cover it up with a stratum of sand or marl ; a slight elevatory 
movement succeeding the paroxysm would have the effect of 
rendering the superimposed stratum the foundation of a second 
lagoon and second bed of salt. According as the periods be- 
tween the elevatory movements and the paroxysms of subsi- 
dence were long or short, the beds of salt would be thick or 
thin. Among the five beds that occur at Stoke Prior, in the 
vicinity of Droitwich, there is one more than thirty feet in 
depth, and one not more than six inches. According as the 
duration of the term of submergence was extended or brief, 
would be the thickness or thinness of the bars by which the 
salt-beds were separated. At Stoke Prior, one of these sepa- 
rating bars falls short of three feet, while another somewhat 
exceeds twenty-four. As the lagoons chanced to be well or 
ill protected from the introduction of extra "pous matter, the 
salt which formed in them would be pure or impure. One of 
the Stoke Prior beds contains full twenty-five per cent, of red- 
dish marl, while another is so unmixed with earthy matter 
that it might be used, without any previous refining prepara- 
tion, for the purpose of the fish-curer. And thus deposition 
after deposition would take place, and, as in the Coal Measures, 
subsidence succeed subsidence, until the entire Saliferous sys- 
tem would :ome to be formed. It has been started as an objec- 
tion to thf» lagoon theory, that the salt-beds contain no organic 



ENGLAND AN 3 ITS PEOPLE 239 

remains, which, it is held, they would have done had they 
owed their origin to sea-water. I am, however, not sure that 
the objection is particularly strong. Let us remember that the 
organisms of the entire system in England are but few and ill 
preserved, and that the marls which alternate with the salt 
have failed to preserve organisms at all ; while the shells of 
the superior band occur but as mere casts in an incoherent 
clay. Let us further remember what takes place in the upper 
pots and hollows of our rocky shores, when, at the height of a 
stream-tide, they receive their fill of sea-water mingled with 
sea-wrack, and are then left during the neaps to present their 
festering contents undisturbed and undiluted to the influence 
of the sun. Their waters assume a turbid blue color and a 
strong fetid odor, and become in this state so powerful a dis- 
solvent, that a few warm days converts the wrack which they 
contain into an impalpable mud. Further, it may be deemed 
a fact worthy of consideration, as at least not hostile to the 
sea-water theory, that the rock-salt of England contains, like 
the bilge-water of these tide-forsaken pots, a considerable ad- 
mixture of iodine, — a substance which enters largely into the 
composition of the sponges and marine algae. 

Single masses of salt, like those of Cordova, might come to 
be elaborated by a greatly more simple process. The Mediter- 
ranean is not an intertropical sea ; but what, notwithstanding, 
would be the probable result, were it to be cut off frcm the 
Atlantic by some such bar of rock as severed the Bohr Assal 
from the Gulf of Tadjura ? There is no other inland sea that, 
in proportion to its extent of surface, receives such scanty con- 
tributions of river water ; and, to supply the waste of evapora- 
tion from its million of square miles of surface, its deep throat 
is continually gulping up the waters of the Atlantic at the 
rate of many thousand tons hourly. A powerful current flows 



240 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

incessantly inwards through the Straits of Gibraltar, and yet 
the level within is not more than maintained. Were the 
Atlantic excluded, the inland sea would of course gradually- 
dry up, until its area had so considerably lessened that its 
rivers would be of themselves sufficient to counterbalance its 
waste of surface ; and were its rivers wanting, as might well 
be the case had it a Desert of Sahara on its northern, as on its 
southern side, even its profounder depths of more than a thou- 
sand fathoms would in time evaporate, and but enormous beds 
of salt remain behind. It seems not improbable, that the loose 
arenaceous materials of the New Red Sandstone may have 
existed, ere they formed an ocean bottom, as the incoherent 
sands of some geologic Sahara that encircled the inland seas 
and lagoons of this system, and that a consequent lack of rivers 
may have operated influentially in the formation of the salt. 
By the way, may not this process of separating huge deposits 
of this mineral from the sea, — a process which has been going 
on, we find, in every formation, from the Onondaga salt group 
of the Upper Silurian, as developed in the United States of 
America, down to the recent salt-lakes of the Asiatic basin, — 
be a provision in nature for preserving to the ocean its proper 
degree of density and saturation ? In the natural course of 
things, the sea would necessarily be growing salter and heavier. 
The waves wash out of every shore, and receive from every 
river, minute supplies of salt, which evaporation has scarce any 
tendency to dissipate, and which, in the lapse of ages, would 
be necessarily accumulating in the waters, till the delicate gills 
and branchiae of the various inmates, formed with reference to 
a rarer medium, would labor amid the dense and briny fluid, 
and their bodies, heretofore of a gravity exactly proportioned 
to that of their element, but now grown too light for it, would 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 241 

float he! jlessly atop.* True, the salt seems in every instance 
to have been abstracted and locked up by accident ; but then 
the recurrence of the accident in every geologic formation 
demonstrates it to be one of those on which the adept in the 
doctrine of chances might safely calculate. It seems an acci- 
dent of the fixed class on which Goldsmith bases his well- 
known reflection in the " Vicar of Wakefield." " To what a 
fortuitous concurrence," he remarks, " do we not owe every 
pleasure and convenience of our lives ! How many seeming 
accidents must unite before we can be clothed or fed! The 
peasant must be disposed to labor, the shower must fall, the 
wind fill the merchant's sail, or numbers must want the usual 
supply." 

And now we strip off the thick saliferous integument of the 
Uppei New Red, with all its marls, rock-salts and sandstones, 
and lay bare the lower formation. Within at least the range 
of our prospect, we shall find in it few marks of organic exist- 
ence, and these few doubtful and indistinct. Some of the red 
incoherent sandstones which form its base contain carbonaceous 
markings, but of a character too obscure to be interpreted ; and 
we may occasionally detect in the calcareous conglomerate 
above — its upper member — shells and encrinital stems; but 
they occur in merely the enclosed fragments, and belong to the 
older rocks. And yet there attaches no little geologic inter- 
est to this barren formation : it marks the era of a great 
change. The rugged conglomerate, which rises so high along 
the flanks of the hill on which we stand, represents in this 

* Indisposition prevented me from hearing Professor Fleming lecture 
last spring on the saliferous deposits ; hut the idea started here lielongs, 
I am inclined to suspect, to the professor, notwithstanding. I think I 
must have received it in conversation, from some attendant on the course, 
who had enjoyed the pleasure which I unluckily missed. 
21 



242 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

locality the Magnesian Limestone, — the formation with which 
the long-derived and darkly-antique Palaeozoic systems end and 
on whose ipper platform the first of the Secondary systems 
begins. A strange shifting of scenes took place on that rough 
stratum at our feet ; but it would seem as if the theatre had 
been darkened when the alterative process was going on. The 
lamps burnt low, and concealed the machinery of the stage. 
In the long course of geologic history there have been many 
medals struck, — many previous to the time of this revolution, 
and many after it ; but none records the nature of the revolu- 
tion itself; nor is there geology enough in the world to fill up 
the gap. It yawns in the middle of the forum, and no one has 
dared to fling even a plausible conjecture into it. Up till the 
deposition of that Magnesian stratum had taken place, all the 
fish of which we possess specimens sufficiently well-preserved 
to indicate the fact were characterized by the heterocercal tail, 
— the vertebral column was prolonged into the upper lobe of 
the caudal fin ;* but with that stratum the peculiarity ceased, 
and fishes with the homocercal tail of our common osseous 
varieties took their place. In that Magnesian formation, too, 
just ere the occurrence of the revolution, we find the first trace 
of reptiles. The long drama of the Palaeozoic period, with all 
its distinct acts, ended with the dethronement of the huge 
sauroid fish, — for untold ages the master existence of creation ; 

* At the annual general meeting of the Geological Society, held in 
February last (1846), it was stated by the president, Mr. Horner, in his 
admirable address, that certain highly characteristic genera of the fishes 
of the Old Red Sandstone, such as the Coccosteus and Pterichthys, do 
not possess the heterocercal tail. It should have perhaps been added, 
however, to prevent misconception, that neither do they possess tails of 
the homocercal type. The form of tail in both cases is ouite as unique 
among the ancient Ganoid order, as that of the tail of the Ray family 
among existing Placoids. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 243 

and the :ew-born reptile reigned in its stead. We find, too, 
numerous well-known types of shells, familiar in the older 
rocks, appearing in this formation for the last time. So far 
as is yet known, the Magnesian Limestone contains the last- 
created species of Producta, and the last-created Spirifer. We 
ascertain that these shells continued to exist up till the break- 
ing out of this great geologic revolution, and that then, like 
some of the extinct French noblesse cut short by the guillotine, 
they disappear forevermore. And now, raising from off the 
landscape this curious integument, and setting it aside, as 
Signor Sarti removes to a side-table one of the bits of his 
figure, — a piece of the external skin, mayhap, thickened by 
its adipose lining or a well-compacted sheet of muscle and 
sinew, — we lay bare the coal-fields, and the range of trappean 
eminences that broke them up as with wedges, just as their 
upper strata had been consolidated, and they had received 
their first thin covering of the Lower New Red. 

I must, I find, employ, though with considerable modifica- 
tions, an illustration which I have used at least once before. 
Here is a small shallow pond, covered over with a thick cake 
of ice, and with a line of boulders rising in its centre. There 
have been two frosts and an intervening thaw. Just as the 
first frost set in, the boulder tops lay under the surface, and 
the earlier-formed crust of ice stretched over them ; but, as 
frequently happens when the temperature sinks suddenly 
below the freezing point, a great shrinking of the water took 
place : the ice, unsupported from beneath, leaned for a little 
while on the boulders, and then giving way on both sides, 
half-way between their summits and the shore, and, as a 
direct consequence, cracking also directly over them, the sum- 
mits citne through, and the ice-sheets lay reclining in masses 
against them, broken by faults, and shivered by transvrrse 



244 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

cuttings. Ai this stage, however, the thaw came on, ant! 
encircled wit 1 a shallow ring of water, that rose over the 
depressed surface, the central patch of shivered ice, and the 
boulders in the midst; and then the second frost set in, and 
the shallow liquefied ring became a solid. Now, let us mark 
the phenomena exhibited. There, first, in the centre of the 
pond, rises the line of boulders. There is an isolated area all 
around them, — a formation of the earlier frost, much broken 
by faults ; and these radiate from the stones rudely and irregu- 
larly, but still, on the whole, distinctly enough to indicate the 
boulder-line as a producing cause of the fracturing and dislo- 
cation. And then, around this broken and disjointed area, we 
find an encircling formation of the later frost, — the solidified 
ring, — in which there are no faults or cuttings, but in which 
all is undisturbed and entire. Our geological model is now 
complete ; that row of boulders represents the chain of Trap 
and Silurian hills which runs along the Dudley coal-field, and 
whose elevation from below has so broken up the formation 
with long lines of radiating faults and transverse fractures. 
The fractured, insulated area of the ice of the first frost repre- 
sents the coal-field itself; the unbroken enveloping ring of the 
second, the surrounding New Red Sandstone. 

Now, there are several points worthy of notice in this model. 
Observe, first, that we can ascertain with great certainty, rela- 
tively at least, at what period the dislocations and fracturings of 
the central area took place. They occurred at the close, or not 
long after the close, of the first ice formation, and not later; 
for had they taken place during the time of the second ice 
formation, it also would have been broken up, whereas we find 
it entire. Observe, next, that under the shallow solidified ring 
of the second frost we may naturally expect to find existing, as 
a nether stratum, a prolongation of the shattered ice of the first. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 245 

And founding on exactly this simple principle, the New Red 
Sandstone of this part of the country, i. e. the unfractured ice 
of the second frost, has been lately pierced through, to get at 
the Coal Measures, i. e. the fractured ice of the first ; and very 
valuable though deeply-seated seams of coal have repaid the 
boldness of the search, and confirmed the justness of the reason- 
ing. Observe, further, that this broken condition of the coal- 
field, if its surface were bared in the style we have dared to 
uncover it from our hill-top, as Asmodeus uncovered the houses 
of Madrid, would present, viewed from above, a very striking 
appearance. Of the twelve panes in the window opposite to 
which I write, by far the most conspicuous is the pane through 
the centre of which an unlucky urchin sent yesterday a stone. 
There is a little hole in the middle, from which some fifteen or 
twenty bright rays proceed, star-like, to every part of the aUra- 
gal frame. The ray-like cracks of the coal-field are, of course, 
wholly obscured by the diluvium and the vegetable mould. A 
shower of snow — to return to our first illustration — has 
covered up, with a continuous veil, central boulders, flawed 
area, and encircling ring, reducing them all to one aspect of 
blank uniformity ; and we can but dip down upon the cracks 
and flaws, here the point of a finger, there the end of a stick ; 
and so, after many soundings have thus been taken, piece out 
a plan of the whole. It would seem as if, in at least one of 
the planets to which we point the telescope, there is no such 
enveloping integument; and the starred and fractured surface 
remains exposed and naked, like that of the ice of the pond ere 
the snow-shower came on. Those who have enjoyed the lux- 
ury of hearing Professor Nichol, of Glasgow, lecture on the 
lunar phenomena, must remember his graphic description of 
the numerous ray-like lines, palpable as the cracks in a dam- 
aged pane, that radiate in every direction, some of them extend- 
21* 



246 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ing- for hundreds of miles, from all the larger craters of the 
moon. 

There are not a few interesting appearances in this Dadley 
coal-field. Its seams, like those of every other coal-field yet 
known, have been formed under very various conditions : some 
of them must have been deposits of vegetable matter washed 
by rivers into seas or lakes ; some of them seem to have formed 
in marshy hollows, like our existing- peat-mosses, or, if we 
must seek out analogies from somewhat warmer climates than 
those in which peat is elaborated, like the Dismal Swamp of 
the United States ; and some evidently covered as great forests 
the sites which they now occupy as coal-seams. There is a 
colliery about a mile and a half to the south of Wolverhampton, 
where an outcrop of what is termed the bottom coal is wrought 
in the open air. The surface, in consequence, has been bared 
of the debris and diluvium, and in one corner the upper plane 
of a thin seam of coal exposed for about a quarter of an acre. 
It is found to present exactly the appearance of a moor on 
which a full-grown fir wood had been cut down a few months 
before, and only the stumps left behind. Stump rises beside 
stump, to the number of seventy-three in all : the thickly- 
diverging roots strike out on every side into what had been 
once vegetable mould, but which now exists as an indurated, 
brownish-colored shale. Many trunks, sorely flattened, lie 
recumbent on the coal, some of them full thirty feet in length, 
while some of the larger stumps measure rather more than two 
feet in diameter. There lie thick around, stigmaria, lepido- 
dendra, calamites, and fragments of ulodendra ; and yet, with 
all the assistance which these lent, the seam of coal formed by 
this ancient forest does not exceed five inches in thickness. It 
must have required no little vegetable matter to consolidate 
into the mineral which supplies us, year after year, with our 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 247 

winter fuel ; the coal which loads a single large collier would, 
when t existed as wood, have built many large colliers. Not 
a few of the stumps in this area are evidently water-worn ; 
and there have been found immediately over them scales of 
Megalickthys, and the shells of an Unio, somewhat resembling 
in form the common pearl muscle of our rivers, but considerably 
smaller. The prostrate forest had been submerged, and mol 
luscs lived and fishes swam over it. It is further worthy of 
notice, that this upper forest is underlaid, at the depth of a few 
feet, by a second forest, in which the stumps lie as thickly 
and are of as great a size, as in the first ; and that this second 
forest is underlaid, in turn, by the remains of yet a third. We 
find three full-grown forests closely packed up in a depth of not 
more than twelve feet. 

Once more, ere we wrap up this Carboniferous integument 
of the landscape, and lay bare the Old Red Sandstone, let us 
mark to how small a coal-field central England has, for so 
many years, owed its flourishing trade. Its area, as I have 
already had occasion to remark, scarcely equals that of one of 
our larger Scottish lakes ; and yet how many thousand steam- 
engines has it set in motion, — how many railway trains has it 
propelled across the country, — how many thousand wagon - 
loads of salt has it elaborated from the brine, — how many mil- 
lion tons of iron has it furnished, raised to the surface, smelted, 
and hammered ! It has made Birmingham a great city, — the 
first iron depot of Europe ; and filled the country with crowded 
towns and busy villages. And if one small field has done so 
much, what may we not expect from those vast basins, laid 
down by Lyell in the geological map of the United States, 
prefixed to* his recent singularly interesting work of travels ? 
When glancing, for the first time, over the three h &ge coal- 
fields of the States, each surrounded by its ring of Old Red 



248 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Sandstone, like patches of mineral bitumen floating in their 
clay-tinged pools, I called to mind the prophecy of Berkeley, 
and thought I could at length see, what Berkeley could not, 
the scheme of its fulfilment. The metaphysical bishop marked 
the westward course of empire : he saw Persia resigning the 
sceptre to Macedonia, and Macedonia yielding it, in turn, to 
Kome, and to those western nations of Europe that abut on the 
Atlantic. And at a time when North America was still covered 
with the primeval forests, he anticipated an age in which that 
country would occupy as preeminent a place among the nations 
as had been occupied in other ages by Assyria or Rome. Its 
enormous coal-fields — equal in extent, some of them, to all 
England, and whose dark seams, exposed to the light for miles, 
inlay the landscape as with ebony, and impart to it its most 
striking peculiarity of feature — seem destined to form no 
mean element in its greatness. If a patch containing but a 
few square miles has done so much for central England, what 
may not fields containing many hundred square leagues do for 
the United States ? 

" Westward the course of empire takes its way; 
The four first acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day: 
Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

And now, stripping off the dark Coal Measures like a pall, 
we expose the chocolate-colored beds of the Old Red Sand- 
stone. In our immediate neighborhood there is a hiatus in the 
geologic series, — the Carboniferous system rests on the Silu- 
rian ; but westwards, and on to the south-west, we may see the 
( lid Red Sandstone stretching away in enormous development. 
As estimated by a practised eye, — that of Sir Roderick Mur- 
chison, — its entire thickness in this part of the country falls 
little short of ten thousand feet. Here, as everywhere else, it 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 249 

seems chiefly re.narkable for its strange forms of the vertebrate 
animals, exclusively fish. The Upper Old Red formation, so 
rich in Scotland in the remains of Holoptyckius, Platygnatkus, 
Botkriolepis, and their contemporaries, is comparatively barren 
in Eng and. The middle formation, however, we find mottled 
with ichthyolitic fragments, representative of the two great 
orders of fish in which, at this early period, and for long ages 
after, all vertebrate existence was comprised. Fragments of 
the ichthyodorulites of Placoids are not unfrequent ; and the 
occipital plates of the Ganoid Cephalaspides abound. The 
true fish seems to have overspread and taken full possession of 
the seas during the deposition of this system, as the Trilobite 
had taken possession of them in the preceding one. But we 
hasten on : the thick Old Red coils up and away, like a piece 
of old elastic parchment that had been acquiring for ages the 
set of the roll ; and now the still more ancient Silurian system 
occupies the entire prospect. In this system the remains of 
the vertebrate animals first appear, — few and far between, 
and restricted, so far as is yet known, to its great upper division 
exclusively. We pass hurriedly downwards. The vertebrata 
vanish from creation. We have traced the dynasty to its first 
beginnings ; and now an ignobler, though more ancient, race ol 
kings occupy the throne.^ We have reached, in our explora 

* Of course, in all cases in which the evidence is negative, the decision 
must be given under protest, as not in its nature irreversible, but depend- 
ent on whatever positive evidence the course of discovery may yet serve to 
evolve. In February last (1846), when this chapter was written, no trace 
of reptiles had been found earlier than the Lower New Red Sandstone, — 
the Permian system of Sir Roderick Murchison. I find, however, from a 
report of the proceedings of the meeting of the British Association, held 
last September at Southampton, that Mr. Lyell having examined certain 
footprints, the discovery of Dr. King, of the United States, which occur in 
Pennsylvania in the middle of the Coal Measures, he has determined them 
to be tliose of a large reptilion. It does seem strange enough that the 



250 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

tions, the dynasty of the Crustacea. In all creation, as it exists 
in this period of dusk antiquity, we see nothing that overtops 
the Trilobite, with his jointed mail of such exquisite workman- 
prints of this eldest of reptiles should be found so far in advance of what 
has been long deemed the vanguard of its order, — the thecodent Saurians 
of the Permian, — and this, too, in a system so carefully explored as the 
Coal Measures ; and yet the occurrence is not without a parallel in the 
geologic scheme. The mammal of the Stonesfield Slate stands as much 
alone, and still further in advance of its fellows. I do not find that I have 
anything to alter in my statement regarding the introduction of the fish. 
In Professor Silliman's American Journal for January 1846, it is stated, 
that an ichthyodorulite had been just discovered in the Onondago Lime- 
stone of New York, and an imperfectly-preserved fish-bone in the Oris- 
kany Sandstone of the same state. There seems, however, to be no reason 
to conclude from their contemporary organisms, — chiefly shells and cor- 
als, which closely approximate to those of the Wenlock Limestone, — that 
either , of them belonged to a more ancient fish than the ichthyodorulite 
described by Mr. Sedgwick, to which I have already had occasion to refer. 
It seems not unworthy of remark, that while among the fish of the Old 
Red Sandstone considerably more than three-fourths of the species, and 
greatly more than nineteen-twentieths of the individuals, are of the 
Ganoid order, all the fish of the Silurian system yet discovered are Pla- 
coids. [The statement here regarding the absence of fish in the Lower 
Silurian, which I retain in a second edition, as it may serve to indicate 
the onward march of geological science, was in accordance, only a few 
months ago, when the first edition of this work appeared, with what was 
known of the more ancient rocks and their fossils. But it also illustrates, 
like my statement respecting the reptiles of the Permian, the unsolid char- 
acter of negative evidence, when made the basis of positive assertion. It 
is now determined that the Lower, like the Upper Silurian, has its fish. 
" Alas for one of my generalizations, founded on negative evidence, on 
which you build ! " says Sir Roderick Murchison, in a communication 
which I owe to his kindness. " The Lower Silurian is no longer to be 
viewed as an invertebrate period ; for the Onchus (species not yet decided) 
has been found in Llandeilo Flags, and in the Lower Silurian Rocks of 
Bala. Ik one respect I am gratified by the discovery ; for the form is so 
very like that of the Onchus Murchisoni of the Ludlow Rocks, that it is 
clear the Silurian system is one great natural-history series, as proved, 
indeed, by all its other organic remains." — Second Edition J] 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 251 

ship, and his prominent eye of many facets, that so capriciously 
refuses to admit the light through more or less than just its 
four hundred and ten spherical lenses. The Cephalopoda, 
indeed, may have held with him a divided empire; but the 
Brachiopoda, the Pteropoda, the Gasteropoda, and the Ace- 
phala, must have been unresisting subjects, and all must have 
been implicit deference among the Crinoidea, the Pennularia, 
the Corals, and the Sponges. As we sink lower and lower, 
the mine of organic existence waxes unproductive and poor : a 
few shells now and then appear, a few graptolites, a few 
sponges. Anon we reach the outer limits of life : a void and 
formless desert stretches beyond, and dark night comes down 
upon the landscape. 



252 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Birmingham ; incessant Clamor of the Place. — Toy-shop of Britain ; Se 
rious Character of the Games in which its Toys are chiefly employed. 
— Museum. — Liberality of the Scientific English. — Musical Genius 
of Birmingham. — Theory. — Controversy with the Yorkers. — Anec. 
dote. — The English Language spoken very variously by the English ; 
in most cases spoken very ill. — English Type of Person. — Attend a 
Puseyite Chapel. — Puseyism a feeble Imitation of Popery. — Popish 
Cathedral. — Popery the true Resting-place of the Puseyite. — Sketch 
of the Rise and Progress of the Puseyite Principle ; its purposed Object 
not attained ; Hostility to Science. — English Funerals. 

The sua had set ere I entered Birmingham through a long 
low suburb, in which all the houses seem to have been built 
during the last twenty years. Particularly tame-looking houses 
they are ; and I had begun to lower my expectations to the 
level of a flat, mediocre, three-mile city of brick, — a sort of 
manufactory in general, with offices attached, — when the 
coach drove up through New-street, and I caught a glimpse 
of the Town Hall, a noble building of Anglesea marble, of 
which Athens in its best days might not have been ashamed. 
The whole street is a fine one. I saw the lamps lighting up 
under a stately new edifice, — the Grammar School of King 
Edward the Sixth, which, like most recent erections of any 
pretension, either in England or among ourselves, bears the 
mediaeval stamp : still further on I could descry, through the 
darkening twilight, a Eoman-looking building that rises over 
the market-place ; and so I inferred that the humble brick of 
Birmingham, singularly abundant, doubtless, and widely spread, 
represents merely the business necessities of the place; and 



ENGLAND AXD ITS PEOPLE. 253 

that, when on any occasion its taste comes to be displayed, it 
proves to be a not worse taste than that shown by its neighbors. 
What first struck my ear as peculiar among the noises of a 
large town, — and their amount here is singularly great, — 
was what seemed to be somewhat irregular platoon-firing, car- 
ried on, volley after volley, with the most persistent delibera- 
tion. The sounds came, I was told, from the " proofing-house," 
— an iron-lined building, in which the gunsmith tests his mus- 
ket-barrels, by giving them a quadruple charge of powder and 
ball, and then, after ranging them in a row, firing them from 
outside the apartment by means of a train. Birmingham pro- 
duces on the average a musket per minute, night and day, 
throughout the year : it, besides, furnishes the army with its 
swords, the navy with its cutlasses and pistols, and the busy 
writers of the day with their steel pens by the hundredweight 
and the ton ; and thus it labors to deserve its name of the 
" Great Toy-shop of Britain," by fashioning toys in abundance 
for the two most serious games of the day, — the game of w r ar 
and the game of opinion-making. 

On the morrow I visited several points of interest connected 
with the place and its vicinity. I found at the New Cemetery, 
on the north-western side of the town, where a party of Irish 
laborers were engaged in cutting deep into the hill-side, a good 
section, for about forty feet, of the Lower New Red Sandstone; 
but its only organisms — carbonized leaves and stems, by much 
too obscure for recognition — told no distinct story ; and so 
incoherent is the enclosing sandstone matrix, that the laborers 
dug into it with their mattocks as if it were a bank of clay. I 
glanced over the Geological Museum attached to the Birming- 
ham Philosophical Institution, and found it, though small, 
beautifully kept and scientifically arranged. It has its few 
specimens of New Red Sandstone fossils, chiefly Posidonoviya, 
22 



254 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

from the upper sandstone band which overlies the sali/erous 
marls ; but their presence in a middle place here between the 
numerous fossils of the Carboniferous and Oolotic systems 
serves but to show the great poverty in organic remains of the 
intermediate system, as developed in England. Though of 
course wholly a stranger, I found free admission to both the 
Dudley and Birmingham Museums, and experienced, with but 
few exceptions, a similar liberality in my visits to all the other 
local collections of England which fell in my way. We have 
still great room for improvement in this respect in Scotland. 
We are far behind at least the laymen of England, — its lib- 
eral mechanicians and manufacturers, and its cultivators of 
science and the arts, — in the generosity with which they 
throw open their collections ; and resemble rather that portion 
of the English clergy who make good livings better by exhibit- 
ing their consecrated places, — not too holy, it would seem, to 
be converted into show-boxes, — for paltry twopences and 
groats. I know not a museum in Edinburgh or Glasgow, save 
that of the Highland Society, to which a stranger can get 
access at once so readily and so free as that which I obtained, 
in the course of my tour, to the Newcastle, Dudley, Birming- 
ham and British Museums. 

Almost all the larger towns of England manifest some one 
leading taste or other. Some are peculiarly literary, some 
decidedly scientific ; and the taste paramount in Birmingham 
seems to be a taste for music. In no town in the world are 
the mechanical arts more noisy : hammer rings incessantly on 
anvil; there is an unending clang of metal, an unceasing 
clank of engines ; flame rustles, water hisses steam roars, and 
from time to time, hoarse and hollow over all, rises the thunder 
of the proofing-house. The people live in an atmosphere con- 
tinually vibrating with clamor ; and it wou d seem as if their 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 255 

amusements had caught the general tone, and become noisy, 
like their avocations. The man who for years has slept 
soundly night after night in the neighborhood of a foundery, 
awakens disturbed, if by some accident the hammering ceases : 
the imprisoned linnet or thrush is excited to emulation by even 
the screeching of a knife-grinder's wheel, or the din of a copper- 
smith's shop, and pours out its soul in music. It seems not 
very improbable that the two principles on which these phe- 
nomena hinge — principles as diverse as the phenomena them- 
selves — may have been influential in inducing the peculiar 
characteristic of Birmingham ; that the noises of the place, 
grown a part of customary existence to its people, — inwrought, 
as it were, into the very staple of their lives, — exert over 
them some such unmarked influence as that exerted on the 
sleeper by the foundery; and that, when they relax from their 
labors, they seek to fill up the void by modulated noises, first 
caught up, like the song of the bird beside the cutler's wheel 
or coppersmith's shop, in unconscious rivalry of the clang of 
their hammers and engines. Be the truth of the theory what 
it may, there can be little doubt regarding the fact on which it 
hinges. No town of its size in the empire spends more time 
and money in concerts and musical festivals than Birmingham; 
no small proportion of its people are amateur performers ; 
almost all are musical critics ; and the organ in its great Hall, 
the property of the town, is, with scarce the exception of that 
of York, the largest in the empire, and the finest, it is sa ; d, 
without any exception. But on this last point there hangs a 
keen controversj^. 

The Yorkers contend that their organ is both the greater and 
the finer organ of the two ; whereas the Birminghamers assert, 
on the contrary, that theirs, though it may not measure more, 
plays v?stly better. "It is impossible," retort the Yorkers, 



256 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

11 that it can play even equally well ; nay, were it even as 
large and as fine an organ, — which it is not, — it would be 
inferior by a half and more, unless to an instrument such as 
ours you could add a Minster such as ours also." — "Ah," 
rejoin the Birminghamers, " fair play ! organ to organ : you are 
coming Yorkshire over us now : the building is not in the case 
at issue. You are surely conscious your instrument, single- 
handed, is no match for ours, or you would never deem it 
necessary to back it in this style by so imposing an auxiliary." 
But the argument of the York controversialists I must give in 
their own words : — "It is worse than idle in the Birmingham 
people," say the authors of the " Guide to York Minster," " to 
boast of their organ being unrivalled : we will by and by show 
how much it falls short of the York organ in actual size. But 
even were their instrument a fac simile of ours, it would not 
avail in a comparison ; for it would still lack the building, 
which, in the case of our magnificent cathedral, is the better 
half of the organ, after all. In this, old Ebor stands unrivalled 
among all competitors in this kingdom. Even in the noble 
cathedrals that are dispersed through the country, no equal can 
be found to York Minster in dimensions, general proportions, 
grandeur of effect to the eye, and the sublimity and mellowness 
which it imparts to sound. It is true, indeed, that such a 
building requires an instrument of vast power to fill it with 
sound ; but when it is filled, as with its magnificent organ it 
now is, the effect is grand and affecting in the highest degree ; 
and yet there are in this organ many solo stops of such beauti- 
fully vocal, soft, and varied qualities of tone, as actually to 
require (as they fascinatingly claim) the closest attention of 
the listener. We beg it to be clearly understood, {hat we have 
not the slightest intention of depreciating the real merits of 
the Birmingham organ, as it is confessedly a very complete 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 257 

and splendid instrument ; but when we notice such unscrupu- 
lous violations of truth as have been so widely disseminated, 
we deem it a duty incumbent upon us to set the public right." 
That I might be the better able to take an intelligent part 
in so interesting a controversy, — a controversy in which, con- 
sidering the importance of the point at issue, it is really no 
wonder though people should lose temper, — I attended a musi- 
cal meeting in the Town Hall, and heard the great organ. The 
room — a very large one — was well filled, and yet the organ 
was the sole performer; for so musical is the community, that 
night after night, though the instrument must have long since 
ceased to be a novelty, it continues to draw together large 
audiences, who sit listening to it for hours. I have unluckily 
a dull ear, and, in order to enjoy music, must be placed in cir- 
cumstances in which I can draw largely on the associative fac- 
ulty; I must have airs that breathe forth old recollections, and 
set me a dreaming; and so, though neither Yorker nor Bir- 
minghamer, I may be deemed no competent authority in the 
organ controversy. I may, however, at least venture to say, 
that the Birmingham instrument makes a considerably louder 
noise in its own limited sphere than that of York in the huge 
Minster ; and that I much preferred its fine old Scotch melo- 
dies, — though a country maiden might perhaps bring them 
cut more feelingly in a green holm at a claes-lifting, — to the 
'great Psalm-tune " of its rival. When listening, somewhat 
awearied, to alternations of scientific music and the enthusias- 
tic plaudits of the audience, I bethought me of a Birmingham 
musical meeting which held rather more than a century ago, 
and of the especial plaudit through which its memory has been 
embalmed in an anecdote. One of the pieces performed on the 
occasion was the " II Penseroso " of Milton set to music ; but it 
went on heavily, till the well-known couplet ending 
22* 



258 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



Iron tears down Pluto's cheek 



at once electiiied the meeting. " Iron tears ! " " Iron tears ! " 
Could there be anything finer or more original ? Tears made 
of iron were the only kind of iron articles not manufactured in 
Birmingham. 

I visited the Botanic Gardens in the neighborhood, but 
found them greatly inferior to those of Edinburgh ; and made 
several short excursions into the surrounding country, merely 
to ascertain, as it proved, that unless one extends one's walk 
some ten or twelve miles into the Dudley, Hagley, Droitwich, 
or Hales Owen districts, there is not a great deal worth seeing 
to be seen. Still, it was something to get the eye familiarized 
with the externals of English life, and to throw one's self in 
the way of those chance opportunities of conversation with the 
common people, which loiterings by the lanes and road-sides 
present. My ear was now gradually becoming acquainted 
with the several varieties of the English dialect, and my eye 
with the peculiarities of the English form and countenance. 
How comes it that in Great Britain, and, I suppose, everywhere 
else, every six or eight square miles of area, nay, every little 
town or village, has its own distinguishing intonations, phrases, 
modes of pronunciation, in short, its own style of speaking the 
general language, almost always sufficiently characteristic to 
mark its inhabitants ? There are not two towns or counties in 
Scotland that speak Scotch after exactly the same fashion ; and 
f now found, in the sister country, varieties of English quite 
as marked, parcelled out into geographical patches as minute. 
in workmen's barracks, where parties of mechanics, gathered 
from all parts of the country, spend the greater part of a 
twelvemonth together at a time, I have, if I mistake not, 
marked these colloquial peculiarities in the forming. There 



ENGLAND ANL» ITS PEOPLE. 259 

.113 few men *vho have not their set phrases and forms of 
speech, acquired inadvertently, in most cases at an early pe- 
riod, when the habit of giving expression to their ideas is in 
the forming, — phrases and set forms which they learn to use 
a good deal oftener than the necessities of their thinking 
require ; and I have seen, in the course of a few months, the 
peculiarities of this kind of some one or two of the more 
intelligent and influential mechanics of a party, caught all 
unwittingly by almost all its members, and thus converted, to 
a considerable extent, into peculiarities of the party itself; and 
peculiar tones, inflections, modes of pronunciation, at first, 
mayhap, chance-derived, seem at least equally catching. A 
single stuttering boy has been known to infect a whole class ; 
and no young person, with the imitative faculty active within 
him, ever spent a few months in a locality distant from his 
home, without bringing back with him, on his return, a sensible 
twang of its prevalent intonations and idioms. Of course, 
when the language of a town or district differs greatly from 
that of the general standard of the country, or veij nearly 
approximates to it, there must have been some original cause 
of the peculiarity, which imparted aim and object to the imi- 
tative faculty. For instance, the Scotch spoken in Aberdeen 
differs more from the pure English standard than that of any 
other town in Scotland ; whereas the Scotch spoken in Inver- 
ness, if Scotch it may be called, most nearly approximates to 
it ; and we may detect a producing cause in both cases. The 
common dialect of Inverness, though now acquired by the ear, 
was originally, and that at no very remote period, the book- 
taught English of an educated Celtic people, to whom Gaelic 
was the mother tongue ; while in Aberdeen — one of the old 
seats of learning in the country, and which seems to have been 
brought, in comparatively an early age, under the influence of 



260 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

tne ancie.it Scotch literature — the language of Barbour^ and 
Dunbar got a firm lodgment among the educated classes, 
which, from the remoteness of the place, the after influence of 
the English court served but tardily to affect. Obviously, 
in some other cases, the local peculiarity, when it involves a 
marked departure from the existing standard, has to be traced, 
not to literature, but to the want of it. But at least the great 
secondary cause of all such peculiarities — the invariable, ever- 
operative cause in its own subordinate place — seems to be 
that faculty of unconscious imitation universally developed in 
the species, which the philosophic Hume deemed so actively 
operative in the formation of national character, and one of 
whose special vocations it is to transfer personal traits and 
characteristics from leading, influential individuals, to septs 
and communities. Next to the degree of surprise that a 
stranger feels in England that the language should be spoken 
so variously by the people, is that of wonder that it should in 
most cases be spoken so ill. Lord Nugent, in remarking, 
in his " Lands Classical and Sacred," that " the English lan- 
guage is the one which in the present state of the habitable 
globe — what with America, India, and Australia — is spoken 
by the greatest number of people," guards his statement by a 
sly proviso ; that is, he adds, if we recognize as English " what 
usually passes for such in most parts of Scotland and the 
United States." Really, his lordship might not have been 
so particular. If .the rude dialects of Lancashire, Yorkshire 
and Northumberland, stand muster as part and parcel of the 
language written by Swift and Addison, and spoken by Burke 
and Bolingbroke, that of Old Machar and Kentucky may be 
wb\. suffered to pass. 

I had entered a considerable way into England ere I was 

* Barbour was Archdeacon of Aberdeen. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 261 

struck by the peculiarities of the English face and figure. 
There is no such palpable difference between the borderers of 
Northumberland and those of Roxburghshire as one sometimes 
marks in the inhabitants of contiguous counties in Scotland 
itself; no such difference, for instance, as obtains between the 
Celtic population of Sutherland, located on the southern side 
of the Ord Hill, and the Scandinavian population of Caithness, 
located on its northern side. But, as the traveller advances on 
the midland counties, the English cast of person and counte- 
nance becomes very apparent. The harder frame and thinner 
face of the northern tribes disappear shortly after one leaves 
Newcastle ; and one meets, instead, with ruddy, fleshy, com- 
pactly-built Englishmen, of the true national type. There is a 
smaller development of bone; and the race, on the average, 
seem less tall : but the shoulders are square and broad, the 
arms muscular, and the chest full ; and if the lower part of the 
figure be not always in keeping with the upper, its inferiority 
is perhaps rather an effect of the high state of civilization at 
which the country has arrived, and the consequent general 
pursuit of mechanical arts that have a tendency to develop the 
arms and chest, and to leave the legs and thighs undeveloped, 
;han an original peculiarity of the English as a race. The 
English type of face and person seems peculiarly well adapted 
to the female countenance and figure ; and the proportion of 
pretty women to the population — women with clear, fair com- 
plexions, well-turned arms, soft features, and fine busts — seems 
very great. Even the not very feminine employment of the 
naileresses of Hales Owen, though hereditary in their families 
for generations, has failed to render their features coarse or 
their forms masculine. To my eye, however, my countrymen 
— and I ha-3 now seen them in almost every district of Scot- 
land — present an appearance of rugged strength, which the 



262 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

English, though they take their place among the more robust 
European nations, do not exhibit ; and I find the carefully-con- 
structed tables of Professor Forbes, based on a large amount of 
actual experiment, corroborative of the impression. As tested 
by the dynamometer, the average strength of the full-grown 
Scot exceeds that of the full-grown Englishman by about one- 
twentieth, — to be sure, no very great difference, but quite 
enough, in a prolonged contest, hand to hand, and man to man, 
with equal skill and courage on both sides, decidedly to turn 
the scale. The result of the conflict at Bannockburn, where, 
according to Barbour, steel rung upon armor in hot, close fight 
for hours, and at Otterburn, where, according to Froissart, the 
English fought with the most obstinate bravery, may have a 
good deal hinged on this purely physical difference. 

I attended public worship on the Sabbath, in a handsome 
chapel in connection with the Establishment, which rises in an 
outer suburb of the town. There were many conversions 
taking place at the time from Puseyism to Popery : almost 
every newspaper had its new list ; and as I had learned that 
the clergyman of the chapel was a high Puseyite, I went to 
acquaint myself, at first hand, with the sort of transition faith 
that was precipitating so much of the altered Episcopacy of 
England upon Rome. The clergyman was, I was told, a char- 
itable, benevolent man, who gave the poor proportionally much 
out of his little, — for his living was a small one, — and who 
was exceedingly diligent in the duties of his office ; but his 
congregation, it was added, had sadly fallen away. The high 
Protestant part of it had gone off when he first became de- 
cidedly a Puseyite ; and latterly, not a few of his warmer 
friends had left him for the Popish cathedral on the other side 
of the town. The hive ecclesiastical had cast off its two 
swarms j — its best Protestants and its best Puseyites. I saw 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 263 

the clergyman go through the service of the day, and deemed 
ids various Puseyistic emendations rather poor things in a pic- 
torial point of view. They reminded me — for the surrcmnding 
atmosphere was by much too clear — of the candle-light deco- 
rations of a theatre, when submitted to the blaze of day, in all 
the palpable rawness of size and serge, ill-jointed carpentry, 
and ill-ground ochre. They seemed sadly mistimed, too, in 
coming into being in an age such as the present; and reminded 
one of maggots developed into flies by artificial heat amid the 
chills of winter. The altar stood in the east end of the build- 
ing; there was a golden crucifix inwrought in the cloth which 
covered it ; and directly over, a painting of one of our Saviour's 
miracles, and a stained window. But the tout ensemble was 
by no means striking ; it was merely fine enough to make one 
miss something finer. The clergyman prayed with his back 
to the people ; but there was nothing grand in the exhibition 
of a back where a face should be. He preached in a surplice, 
too ; but a surplice is a poor enough thing in itself, and in no 
degree improves a monotonous discourse. And the appearance 
of the congregation was as little imposing as that of the ser- 
vice : the great bulk of the people seemed drowsily inattentive. 
The place, like a bed of residuary cabbage-plants twice divested 
of its more promising embryos, had been twice thinned of its 
earnestness, — first of its Protestant earnestness, which had 
flowed over to the meeting-house and elsewhere, — next of its 
Puseyite earnestness, which had dribbled out into the cathedral; 
and there had been little else left to it than a community of 
what I shall venture to term ^-Christians, — people whose 
attachments united them, not to the clergyman or his doctrines, 
but simply, like those of the domestic cat, to the walls of the 
building. The chapel contained the desk from which their 
banns had been proclaimed, and the font in which their children 



264 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

had been baptized : and the corner in which they had sat for so 
many years was the only corner anywhere in England in which 
they could fairly deem themselves " at church." And so there 
were they to be found, Sabbath after Sabbath, regardless of the 
new face of doctrine that flared upon them from the pulpit. 
The sermon, though by no means striking as a piece of com- 
position or argument, was fraught with its important lesson. 
It inscribed the " Do this and live " of the abrogated covenant, 
so congenial to the proud confidence of the unsubdued human 
heart, on a substratum of that lurking fear of unforgiving tres- 
pass, not less natural to man, which suggests the mediation of 
the merely human priest, the merit of penance, and the neces- 
sity of the confessional. It represented man as free to will 
and work out his own salvation ; but exhibited him also as a 
very slave, because he had failed to will and to work it. It 
spoke of a glorious privilege, in which all present had shared, 
— the privilege of being converted through baptism ; but left 
every one in doubt whether, in his individual case, the benefit 
had not been greatly more than neutralized by transgression 
since committed, and whether he were not now in an im- 
mensely more perilous state of reprobation than if he had 
never been converted. Such always is the vaulting liberty of 
a false theology, when held in sincerity. Its liberty invariably 
" overleaps itself, and falls on the other side." It is a liberty 
which " gendereth to bondage." 

I next visited the Popish cathedral, and there I found in per- 
fection all that Puseyism so palpably wanted. "What perhaps 
first struck was the air of real belief — of credulity all awake 
and earnest — which characterized the congregation. The 
mind, as certainly as the body, seemed engaged in the kneel- 
ings, the bowings, the responses, the crossings of the person, 
and the dippings of the finger-tip m the holy water. It was the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 2G5 

harvest season, and the passages of the building were crowded 
with Irish reapers, — a ragged and many-patched assemblage. 
Of the corresponding class in England and Scotland, Protest- 
antism has no hold, — they have broken loose from her con- 
trol ; but Popery in Ireland has been greatly more fortunate : 
she is peculiarly strong in the ignorant and the reckless, and 
formidable in their possession. In the services of the cathedral 
everything seemed in keeping. The altar, removed from the 
congregation by an architectural screen, and enveloped in a 
dim obscurity, gave evidence, in its picturesque solemnity, — 
its twinkling lights and its circling incense, — that the church 
to which it belonged had fully mastered the principles of effect. 
The musically modulated prayer, sounding in the distance 
from within the screen, — the imposing procession, — the mys- 
terious genuflections and frequent kneelings, — the sudden 
music, rising into paroxysms of melody in the crises of the pass- 
ing ceremony, — the waving of the smoking censer, — the toll- 
ing of the great bell at the elevation of the host, — all spoke 
of the accumulative art of more than a thousand years. The 
trick of scenic devotion had been well caught, — the theatric 
religion that man makes for himself had been skilfully made. 
The rites of Puseyism seem but poor shadows in comparison, 
— mere rudimentary efforts in the way of design, that but serve 
to beget a taste for the higher style of art. I did not wonder 
that such of the Puseyites of the chapel as were genuine ad- 
mirers of the picturesque in religion should have found their 
way to the cathedral. 

In doctrine, however, as certainly as in form and ceremony, 
the Romish church constitutes the proper resting-place of the 
Puseyite. The ancient Christianity, as it exists in the Angli- 
can Church, is a mere inclined slide, to let him down into it. 
It furnishes him with no doctrinal resting-place of its own. In 
23 



266 FIRST IMPRESSICNS OF 

every form of Christianity in which men are earnest t:.ere 
must exist an infallibility somewhere. By the Episcopalian 
Protestant, as by the Presbyterian, that infallibility is recog 
nized as resting in the Scriptures ; and by the consistent Papist 
that infallibility is recognized as resting in the Church. But 
where does the infallibility of the Puseyite rest ? Not in the 
Scriptures ; for, repudiating the right of private judgment, he 
is necessarily ignorant of what the Scriptures truly teach. 
Not in tradition ; for he has no trustworthy guide to show hint 
where tradition is right, or where wrong. Not in his Church ; 
ior his Church has no voice ; or, what amounts to exactly the 
same thing, her voice is a conflicting gabble of antagonist 
sounds. Now one bishop speaks after one fashion, — now 
another bishop speaks after another, — and anon the queen 
speaks, through the ecclesiastical courts, in tones differing from 
them all. Hence the emphatic complaint of Mr. Ward, in the 
published letter in which he assigns his reasons for entering 
the communion of Rome : — "He can find," he says, " no 
teaching" in the English Church; and repudiating, as he does, 
the right of private judgment, there is logic in his objection. 
" If we reverence," he argues, " the fact of the apostolicity of 
creeds on the authority of the English Church, so far as we do 
not believe the English Church to be infallibly directed, exactly 
so far we do not believe the creeds to be infallibly true." Con- 
sistent Puseyism can find its desiderated infallibility in Rome 
only. 

The rise and progress of this corruption in the Church of 
England promises to form a curious episode in the ecclesiasti- 
cal history of the age. It is now rather more than ten years 
since Whigism, yielding to the pressure of remvigorated 
Popery, suppressed the ten Irish bishoprics, and a body of 
politic churchmen met to deliberate how best, in the future, 



ENGLAND AND TS PEOPLE. 267 

such deadly aggressions on their Church might be warded off. 
They saw her unwieldy bulk lying in a state of syncope before 
the spoiler ; and concluded that the only way to save was to 
rouse and animate her, by breathing into her some spirit of 
life. Unless they succeeded in stirring her up to defend her- 
self, they found defence would be impracticable : it was essen- 
tial to the protection of her goods and chattels that she should 
become a living soul, too formidable to be despoiled ; and, in 
taking up their line of policy, they seem to have set themselves 
as coolly to determine respecting the nature and kind of spirit 
which they should breathe into her, as if they were a conclave 
of chemists deliberating regarding the sort of gas with which a 
balloon was to be inflated. They saw two elements of strength 
in the contemporary Churches, and but two only, — the Puri- 
tanic and the Popish element; and making their choice be- 
tween them, they selected the Popish one as that with which 
the Church of England should be animated.^ On some such 
principle, it would seem, as that through which the human 
body is enabled to resist, by means of the portion of the atmos- 
pheric air within, the enormous pressure of the atmospheric 
air without, strength was sought in an internal Popery, from 
the pressure of the aggressive Popery outside. An extensive 
and multifarious machinery was set in motion, in consequence 
of the determination, with the scarce concealed design, of " un- 
protestantizing the English Church." Ceremonies less imposing 
than idle were introduced into her services ; altars displaced at 

* I am far from asserting here that they had it as much in their power 
to avail themselves of the Puritanic as of the Popish element ; or yet that 
if they had, any mere considerations of policy would have led them to 
adopt it. As shown by such publications as " Keble's Sacred Year," and 
" Proud's Remains," the current of tendency in the English Church had 
begun to flow for several years previous in the mediaeval channel, and the 
members of this meeting had already got afloat on the stream 



268 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the Reformation were again removed to their prescribed site in 
the east; candles were lighted at noon-day; crucifixes erected; 
the clergyman, after praying with his back to the people, as- 
cended the pulpit in his surplice to expatiate on the advantages 
of the confessional, and the real presence in the sacrament ; 
enticing pictures were held up to the suffering poor, of the 
comforts and enjoyments of their class in the middle ages ; and 
the pew-battle was fought for them, that they might be brought 
under the influence of the revived doctrines. To the aristoc- 
racy hopes were extended of a return to the old state cf im- 
plicit obedience on the part of the people, and of absolute 
authority on the part of the people's lords : the whole artillery 
of the press was set in requisition, — from the novelette and 
poem for the young lady, and the tale for the child, to the 
high-priced review for the curious theologian, and the elaborate 
" Tract for the Times." Nay, the first journal in the world 
was for a season engaged in advocating the designs of the 
party. And the exertions thus made were by no means fruit- 
less. The unprotestantizing leaven introduced into the mass 
of the English Establishment began to ferment, and many 
of the clergy, and not a few of the laity, were infected. 

But there was a danger in thus animating with the Popish 
spirit the framework of the English Church, on which the 
originators of the scheme could not have fully calculated. It 
has been long held in Scotland as one of the popular supersti- 
tions of the country, that it is a matter of extreme danger to 
simulate death, or personate the dead. There is a story told 
in the far north of a young fellow, who, going out one night, 
wrapped in a winding-sheet, to frighten his neighbors, was 
met, when passing through the parish churchyard, by a real 
ghost, that insisted, as their vocation was the same, on their 
walking together; and so terrible, says the story, was the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 269 

•hock which the young fellow received, that in a very few days 
he bad become a real -host too. There is another somewhat 
similar story told of a lad who had, at a lyke wake, taken the 
place <>(' the corpse, with the intention of rising in the middle 
of the night to terrify the watchers, and was found, when a 
brother wag gave the agreed signal, deaf to time; for in the in- 
terval he had become as true a corpse as the one whose stretch- 
ing hoard he had usurped. Now, the original Puseyites, in 
dressing out their clerical brethren in the cerements of Popery, 
and setting them a-walking, could hardly have foreseen that 
many of them won- to become the actual ghosts which they 
had decked them to simulate. They did not know that the old 
Scotcli superstition, in at least its relation to them, was not an 
idle fancy, but a sober fact; and that these personators of the 
dead wen- themselves in imminent danger of death. Some 

suspicion of the kind, however, does seem to have crossed 
them. Much that is peculiar in the ethics of the party appears 
to have been framed with an eye to the uneasinesses of con- 
sciences not quite seared, when hound down hy the require- 
ments of their position to profess beliefs of one Kind, and by the 
policy of (heir party to promulgate beliefs of another, — to be 
ostensibly Protestant, and yet to he instant in season and out of 
season in subverting Protestantism; in short, in the language 
of Mr. Ward, " to be Anglican clergymen, and yet hold Roman 
Catholic doctrine." But the moral sense in earnest Puseyism is 
proving itself a too tender and sensitive thing to bear with the 
morality which politic Puseyism, ere it gathered heat and life, 
had prepared for its use. It finds that the English Church is 
not the Church of Rome, — that the Convocation is not the 
Vatican, nor Victoria the Pope, — that it is not honest to sub 
vert Prot jstintism under cloak of the Protestant name, nor to 
truster in its nudes, and eat its bread, when in the service of the 
23* 



270 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

enemy. And so luseyism, in its more vital scions, is fast 
ceasing to be Puseyism. The newspapers still bear their lists 
of conversions to Rome ; and thus the means so invidiously 
resorted to of strengthening the English Establishment against 
Popery is fast developing itself into a means of strengthening 
Popery at the expense of the English Establishment. 

The influence on science of this mediaeval Christianity, so 
strangely revived, forms by no means the least curious part of 
its history. It would appear as if the doctrine of authority, as 
taught by Puseyism and Popery, — the doctrine of a human 
infallibility in religious matters, whether vested in Popes, 
Councils, or Churches, — cannot coexist in its integrity, as a 
real belief, with the inductive philosophy. It seems an antag- 
onist force ; for, wherever the doctrine predominates, the phi- 
losophy is sure to decline. The true theologic counterpart to 
the inductive scheme of Bacon is that Protestant right of pri- 
vate judgment, which, dealing by the word of God as the 
inductive philosophy deals by the works of God, involves as 
its principle what may be termed the inductive philosophy of 
theology. There is certainly nothing more striking in the his- 
tory of the resuscitation of the mediaeval faith within the Eng- 
lish Church, than its marked hostility to scientific truth, as 
exhibited in the great educational institutions of England. 
Every product of a sound philosophy seems disappearing 
under its influence, like the fruits and flowers of the earth 
when the chilling frosts of winter set in. But it is impossible 
to state the fact more strongly than it has been already stated 
by Mr. Lyell, in his lately published " Travels in America." 
" After the year 1S39," he says, " we may consider three-fourths 
of the sciences still nominally taught at Oxford to have been 
virtually exiled from the university. The class-rooms of the 
professors were some of them entirely, others nearly deserted. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 271 

Chemistry and botany attracted, between the years 1840 and 
1844, from three to seven students ; geometry, astronomy, and 
experimental philosophy, scarcely more ; mineralogy and geol- 
ogy, still taught by the same professor who, fifteen years be- 
fore, had attracted crowded audiences, from ten to twelve; 
political economy, still fewer ; even ancient history and poetry 
scarcely commanded an audience ; and, strange to say, in a 
country with whose destinies those of India are so closely 
bound up, the first of Asiatic scholars gave lectures tu one or 
two pupils, and these might have been absent, had not the. 
cherished hope of a Boden scholarship for Sanscrit induced 
them to attend." I may state, in addition, on the best author- 
ity, that the geological professor here referred to, — Dr. Buck- 
land, — not only one of the most eminent masters of his science, 
but also one of the most popular of its exponents, — lectured, 
during his last course, to a class of three. Well may it be 
asked whether the prophecy of Pope is not at length on the eve 
of fulfilment : — 

" She comes ! she comes ! the sable throne behold, 
Of Night primeval and of Chaos old, 
As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 
The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain, — 
As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppressed, 
Close one by one in everlasting rest. 
Thus, at her felt approach and secret might, 
Art after art goes out, and all is night." 

The anti-scientific influences of the principle have, however, 
not been restricted to the cloisters of the university. They 
have been creeping of late over the surface of English society, 
as that sulphurous fog into which the arch-fiend in Milton 
transformed himself when he sought to dash creation into 
chaos crept of old over the surface of Eden. The singularly 



272 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

extended front of opposition presented last autumn by the 
newspaper press of England to the British Association, when 
holding its sittings at Southampton, and the sort of running fire 
kept up for weeks after on its more distinguished members, — 
men such as Sir Roderick Murchison, Dr. Buckland, and Mr. 
Lyell, — s3emto have been an indirect consequence of a grow- 
ing influence in the country on the part of the revived super- 
stition. One of the earliest assaults made on the Association, 
as hostile in its nature and tendencies to religion, appeared 
several years ago in the leading organ of Tractarianism, the 
" British Critic ; " but the " Critic " in those days stood much 
alone. Now, however, though no longer in the field, it has 
got not a few successors in the work, and its party many an 
active ally. The mediaeval miasma, originated in the bogs 
and fens of Oxford, has been blown aslant over the face of the 
country; and not only religious, but scientific truth, is to ex- 
perience, it would seem, the influence of its poisonous blights 
and rotting mildews. 

It is not difficult to conceive how the revived superstition 
of the middle ages should bear no good will to science or its 
institutions. Their influences are naturally antagonistic. The 
inductive scheme of interrogating nature, that takes nothing 
for granted, and the deferential, submissive scheme, that, in 
ecclesiastical matters, yields wholly to authority, and is content 
though nothing should be proved, cannot well coexist in one 
and the same mind. " I believe because it is impossible," 
says the devout Medievalist ; " I believe because it is demon- 
strable," says the solid Baconian. And it is scarce in the 
nature of things that one and the same individual should be a 
Bacmian in one portion of his mind and a Medievalist in 
another, — that in whatever relates to the spiritual and eccle- 
siastical, he should take all on trust, and in whatever relates 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 273 

to the visible ana material, believe nothing without evidence. 
The Baconian state of mind is decidedly anti-medioeval ; and 
hence the avowed Puseyite design of unprotestantizing the 
English Church finds a scarce more determined enemy in the 
truth elicited by the enlightened and well-directed study of the 
word of God, than in the habit of mind induced by the enlight- 
ened and well-directed study of the works of God. Nor is it 
in any degree matter of wonder that modern Tractarianism 
should on this principle be an especial enemy of the Brit- 
ish Association, — an institution rendered peculiarly provoking 
by its peripatetic propensities. It takes up the empire piece- 
meal, by districts and squares, and works its special efforts 
on the national mind much in the way that an agriculturist 
of the modern school, by making his sheepfold-walk bit by 
bit over the area of an entire moor, imparts such fertility to 
the soil, that the dry unproductive heaths and mosses wear out 
and disappear, and the succulent grasses spring up instead. A 
similar association located in London or Edinburgh would be, 
to borrow from Dr. Chalmers, a scientific institute on merely 
the attractive scheme : men in whom the love of science had 
been already excited would seek it out, and derive profit and 
pleasure in that communion of congenial thought and feJing 
which it created ; but it could not be regarded as a great 
intellectual machine for the production of men of science, and 
the general formation of habits of scientific inquiry. But the 
peripatetic character of the Association constitutes it a scien 
tific institute on the aggressive system. It sets itself down every 
year in a new locality ; excites attention ; awakens curiosity ; 
furnishes the provincial student with an opportunity of compar- 
ing the fruits of his researches with those of labors previously 
directed by resembling minds to similar walks of exploration 
enp.Oies him to test the value of his discoveries, and ascertain 



274 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

their exact degrees of originality ; above all, brings hundreds 
around him to experience an interest they never felt before, in 
questions of science; imparts facts to them never to be for- 
gotten, and habits of observation not to be relinquished; in 
short, communicates to all its members a disposition oi mind 
exactly the reverse of that indolent and passive quiescence of 
mood which Puseyism so strongly inculcates by homily and 
novelette, on at least its lay adherents. Truly, it is by no 
means strange that the revived principle, and those organs of 
the public press which it influences, should be determined 
enemies of the British Association. It is, however, but just 
to add, that Tractarianism and its myrmidons have not been 
the only assailants. Tractarianism first raised the fog, but not 
a few good simple people of the opposite party have since got 
bewildered in it ; and, through the confusion incident on losing 
their way, they have fallen in the quarrel into the ranks of 
their antagonists, and have been doing battle in their behalf.^ 

On quitting the Puseyite chapel, I met a funeral, the first I 
had seen in England. It was apparently that of a person in 
the middle walks, and I was a good deal struck with its dis- 
similarity, in various points, to our Scotch funerals of the same 
class. The coffin of planed elm, finished off with all the care 
usually bestowed on pieces of household furniture made of the 
commoner forest hardwood, was left uncolored, save on the 
edges, which, like those of a mourning card, were belted with 
black. There was no pall covering it; and, instead of being 
borne on staves, or on the shoulders, it was carried, basket- 
like, by the handles. An official, bearing a gilded baton, 
marched in front ; some six or eight gentlemen in black paced 
slowly beside the bearers ; a gentleman and lady, in deep 

* As shown by the assaults on the Association of such organs of the 
r jOW Church party as the Dublin " Statesman " and London " Record." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 275 

mourning, walked arm-in-arm at the coffin-head; and a boy 
and girl, also arm-in-arm, and in mourning, came up behind 
them. Such was the English funeral, — one of those things 
which, from their familiarity, are not described by the people 
of the country to which they belong, and which prove unfa- 
miliar, in consequence, to the people of other countries. On 
the following Monday I took an outside seat on a stage-coach, 
for Stratford-oi -Avon. 



276 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Drive from Birmingham to Stratford rather tame. — Ancient Building in 
a modern-looking Street ; of rude and humble Appearance. — " The Im- 
mortal Shakspeare born in this House." — Description of the Interior. — 
The Walls and Ceiling covered with Names. — Albums. — Shakspeare, 
Scott, Dickens ; greatly different in their Intellectual Stature, but yet 
all of one Family. — Principle by which to take their Measure. — No 
Dramatist ever draws an Intellect taller than his own. — Imitative Fac- 
ulty. — The Reports of Dickens. — Learning of Shakspeare. — New 
Place. — The Rev. Francis Gastrall. — Stratford Church. — The Poet's 
Grave ; his Bust ; far superior to the idealized Representations. — The 
Avon. — The Jubilee, and Cowper's Description of it.— The true Hero 
Worship. — Quit Stratford for Olney. — Get into bad Company by the 
way. — Gentlemen of the Fancy. — Adventure. 

The drive from Birmingham, for the greater part of the way, 
*s rather tame. There is no lack of fields and hedge-rows, 
houses and trees ; but, from the great flatness of the country, 
they are doled out to the eye in niggardly detail, at the rate of 
about two fields and three hedge-rows at a time. Within a few 
miles of Stratford-on-Avon, however, the scenery improves. 
We are still on the Upper New Red Sandstone, and on this 
formation the town is built : but the Lias beyond shoots out, 
just in the line of our route, into a long promontory, capped by 
two insulated outliers, that, projected far in advance, form the 
outer piquets of the newer and higher system ; and for some 
four or five miles ere we enter the place, we coast along the 
tree-mottled shores of this green headland and its terminal 
islands. A scattered suburb introduces us to a rather common- 
place-looking street of homely brick houses, that seem as if they 
had all been reared within the last half century ; all, at least, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 277 

save one, a rud 3, unsightly specimen of the oak-framed domi- 
cile of the days of Elizabeth and James. Its walls are incrusted 
with staring white-wash, its beams carelessly daubed over 
with lamp-black; a deserted butcher's shop, of the fifth-rate 
class, with the hooks still sticking in the walls, and the sill-board 
still spread out, as if to exhibit the joints, occupies the ground- 
floor ; the one upper story contains a single rickety casement, 
with a forlorn flower-pot on the sill ; and directly in front of 
the building there is what seems a rather clumsy sign-board, 
hung between two poles, that bears on its weather-beaten sur- 
face a double line of white faded letters on a ground of black. 
We read the inscription, and this humblest of dwellings — 
humble, and rather vulgar to boot — rises in interest over the 
palaces of kings : — " The immortal Shakspeare was born in 
this house." I shall first go and see the little corner his birth- 
place, I said, and then the little corner his burial-place : they 
are scarce half a mile apart ; nor, after the lapse of more than 
two centuries, does the intervening modicum of time between 
the two events, his birth and his burial, bulk much larger than 
the modicum of space that separates the respective scenes of 
them ; but how marvellously is the world filled with the cogi- 
tations which employed that one brain in that brief period! 
Could it have been some four pounds' weight of convoluted 
matter, divided into two hemispheres, that, after originating 
these buoyant immaterialities, projected them upon the broad 
current of time, and bade them sail onwards and downwards 
forever ? I cannot believe it : the sparks of a sky-rocket sur- 
vive the rocket itself but a very few seconds. I cannot believe 
that these thoughts of Shakspeare, " that wander through 
eternity," are the mere sparks of an exploded rocket, — the mere 
scintillations of a little galvanic battery, made of fibre and 
24 



278 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

albumen, like that of the torpedo, and whose ashes v*.uld now 
lie in the comer of a snuff-box. 

I passed through the butcher's shop, over a broken stone 
pavement, to a little gloomy kitchen behind, and then, under 
charge of the guide, up a dark narrow stair, to the low-browed 
room in which the poet was born. The floor of old oak, much 
worn in the seams, has apparently undergone no change since 
little Bill, be-frocked and be-booted in woolen prepared from the 
rough material by the wool-comber his father, coasted it along 
the walls, in bold adventure, holding on, as he went, by tables 
and chairs. The ceiling, too, though unluckily covered up 
by modern lath and plaster, is in all probability that which 
stretched over the head of the boy. It presents at least no 
indication of having been raised. A man rather above the 
middle size may stand erect under its central beam with his 
hat on, but with certainly no room to spare ; and it seems more 
than probable that, had the old ceiling been changed for another, 
the new one would have been heightened. But the walls 
have been sadly altered. The one window of the place is no 
longer that through which Shakspeare first saw the light ; nor 
is the fireplace that at which he stealthily lighted little bits of 
stick, and twirled them in the air, to see the fiery points con- 
verted into fiery circles. There are a few old portraits and old 
bits of furniture, of somewhat doubtful lineage, stuck round the 
room; and, on the top of an antique cabinet, a good plaster 
^ast of the monumental bust in the church, in which, from its 
greater accessibility, one can better study than in the original 
the external signs affixed by nature to her mind of largest 
calibre. Every part of the walls and ceiling is inscribed with 
names. I might add mine, if I chose, to the rest, the woman 
told me ; but I did not choose it. Milton and Dryden would 
have added theirs : he, the sublimest of poets, who, ere criticism 






ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 279 

had taken the altitude of the great writer whom he so fervently 
loved and admired, could address him in the fondness of youth- 
ful enthusiasm as " my Shakspeare ; " and he, the sympathetic 
critic, who first dared to determine that " of all modern, and 
perhaps ancient poets, Shakspeare had the largest and most 
comprehens.ve soul." Messrs. Wiggins and Tims, too, would 
have added their names ; and all right. They might not 
exactly see for themselves what it was that rendered Shaks- 
peare so famous ; but their admiration, entertained on trust, 
would be at least a legitimate echo of his renown ; and so their 
names would have quite a right to be there as representatives 
of the outer halo — the second rainbow, if I may so express 
myself — of the poet's celebrity. But I was ashamed to add 
mine. I remembered that I was a writer ; that it was my 
business to write, — to cast, day after day, shavings from off 
my mind, — the figure is Cowper's, — that went rolling away, 
crisp and dry, among the vast heap already on the floor, and 
were never more heard of; and so I didn't add my name. 
The woman pointed to the album, or rather set of albums, 
which form a record of the visiters, and said her mother could 
have turned up for me a great many names that strangers liked 
to look at ; but the old woman was confined to her bed, and 
she, considerably less at home in the place, could show me only 
a few. The 'first she turned up was that of Sir Walter Scott; 
the second, that of Charles Dickens. " You have done remark- 
ably well," I said ■ "your mother couldn't have done better. 
Now, shut the book." 

It was a curious coincidence. Shakspeare, Scott Dickens ! 
The scale is a descending one ; so is the scale from the lion to 
the leopard, and from the leopard to the tiger-cat ; but cat, 
leopard, and lion, belong to one great family ; and these three 
poets belong unequivocally to one great family also. They are 



280 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

generically one ; masters, each in his own sphere, not simply 
of the ar f of exhibiting character in the truth of nature, — for 
that a Hume or a Tacitus may possess, — but of the rarer and 
more difficult dramatic art of making characters exhibit them- 
selves. It is not uninstructive to remark how the peculiar 
ability of portraying character in this form is so exactly propor- 
tioned to the general intellectual power of the writer who 
possesses it. No dramatist, whatever he may attempt, ever 
draws taller men than himself: as water in a bent tube rises to 
exactly the same height in the two limbs, so intellect in the 
character produced rises to but the level of the intellect of the 
producer. Milton's fiends, with all their terrible strength and 
sublimity, are but duplicates of the Miltonic intellect united to 
vitiated moral natures; nor does that august and adorable 
Being, who perhaps should not have been dramatically intro- 
duced into even the " Paradise Lost," excel as an intelligence 
the too daring poet by whom he is exhibited. Viewed with 
reference to this simple rule, the higher characters of Scott, 
Dickens, and Shakspeare, curiously indicate the intellectual 
stature of the men who produced them. Scott's higher char- 
acters possess massive good sense, great shrewdness, much 
intelligence : they are always very superior, if not always great 
men ; and by a careful arrangement of drapery, and much 
study of position and attitude, they play their parts wonderfully 
well. The higher characters of Dickens do not stand by any 
means so high ; the fluid in the original tube rests at a lower 
level : and no one seems better aware of the fact than Dickens 
himself. He knows his proper walk ; and, content with expati- 
ating in a comparatively humble province of human life and 
character, rarely stands on tiptoe, in the vain attempt to portray 
an intellect taller than his own. The intellectual stature of 
Shakspeare rises, on the other hand, to the highest level of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 281 

man. His range incudes the loftiest and the lowest characters, 
and takes in all between. There was no human greatness 
which he could not adequately conceive and portray ; whether 
it was a purely intellectual greatness, as in Hamlet ; or a purely 
constitutional greatness, — forceful and massive, — as in Corio- 
lanus and Othello ; or a happy combination of both, as in Julius 
Caesar. He could have drawn with equal effect, had he flour- 
ished in an after period, the Lord Protector of England and the 
Lord Protector's Latin secretary ; and men would have recog- 
nized the true Milton in the one, and the genuine Cromwell in 
the other. 

It has frequently occurred to me, that the peculiar dramatic 
faculty developed so prominently in these three authors, that, 
notwithstanding their disparities of general intellect, we regard 
it as constituting their generic stamp, and so range them to- 
gether in one class, seems, in the main, rather a humble one, 
when dissociated from the auxiliary faculties that exist in the 
mind of genius. Like one of our Scotch pebbles, so common 
in some districts, in their rude state, that they occur in almost 
every mole-hill, it seems to derive nearly all its value and beauty 
from the cutting and the setting. A Shakspeare without genius 
would have been merely the best mimic in Stratford. He 
would have caught every peculiarity of character exhibited by 
his neighbors, — every little foible, conceit, and awkwardness, 
— every singularity of phrase, tone, and gesture. However little 
heeded when he spoke in his own character, he would be deemed 
worthy of attention when he spoke in the character of others ; 
for whatever else his viva voce narratives might want, they 
would be at least rich in the dramatic ; men would recognize 
in his imitations peculiarities which they had failed to remark 
in the originals, but which, when detected by the keen eye of the 
mimic, would delight them, as " natural though not obvious ; " 
24* 



282 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and though, perhaps, regarded not without fear, he would, at 
all events, be deemed a man of infinite amusement. But to this 
imitative faculty, — this mere perception of the peculiarities that 
confer on men th.3 stamp of individuality, — there was added a 
world-wide invention, an intellect of vastest calibre, depths un- 
sounded of the poetic feeling, with a breadth of sympathy which 
embraced all nature ; and the aggregate was a Shakspeare. I 
have seen this imitative ability, so useless in the abstract, ren- 
dered valuable by being set in even very humble literary attain- 
ment, — that of the newspaper reporter ; and have had to esti- 
mate at a different rate of value the respective reports of gentle- 
men of the press, equal in their powers of memory and in gen- 
eral acquirement, and unequal merely in the degree in which 
they possessed the imitative faculty. In the reports of the one 
class I have found but the meaning of the speakers; in those 
of the other, both the .meaning and the speakers too. Dickens, 
ere he became the most popular of living English authors, must 
have been a first-class reporter ; and the faculty that made 
him so is the same which now leads us to speak of him in the 
same breath with Shakspeare. Bulwer is evidently a man of 
great reflective power ; but Bulwer, though a writer of novels 
and plays, does not belong to the Shakspearian genus. Like 
those dramatists of English literature that, maugre their play- 
writing propensities, were not dramatic, — the Drydens and 
Thomsons of other days, — he lacks the imitative power. By 
the way, in this age of books, I marvel no bookseller has ever 
thought of presenting the public with the Bow-street reports 
of Dickens. They would form assuredly a curious work, — not 
less so, though on a different principle, than the Parliamentary 
reports of Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

No one need say what sort of a building the church of Strat- 
ford-on-Avon is : no other edifice in the kingdom ha half so 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 283 

often employed the pencil and the burin. I may just remark, 
however, that it struck me at a little distance, rising among its 
graceful trees, beside its quiet river, as~ one of the finest old 
English churches I had yet seen. One passes, in approach- 
ing it from the poet's birthplace, through the greater part of 
Stratford. We see the town-hall, a rather homely building, 
— the central point of the bizarre Jubilee Festival of 1769, — 
with a niche in front occupied by a statue of Shakspeare, 
presented to the town by David Garrick, the grand master of 
ceremonies on the occasion. We then pass a lane, which leads 
down to the river, and has a few things worth looking at on 
either hand. There is an old Gothic chapel on the one side, 
with so ancient a school attached to it, that it existed as such 
in the days of the poet's boyhood ; and in this school, it is sup- 
posed, he may have acquired the little learning that served 
fairly to enter him on his after-course of world-wide attain- 
ment. Little, I suppose, would have served the purpose : a 
given knowledge of the alphabet, and of the way of compound- 
ing its letters into words, as his premises, would have enabled 
the little fellow to work out the rest of the problem for him- 
self. There has been much written on the learning of Shak- 
speare, but not much to the purpose : one of our old Scotch prov- 
erbs is worth all the dissertations on the subject I have yet seen. 
" God's bairns," it says, " are eath to lear" i. e. easily instructed. 
Shakspeare must, I suppose, have read many more books than 
Homer (we may be sure, every good one that came in his way, 
and some bad ones), and yet Homer is held to have known a 
thing or two : the more ancient poet was unquestionably as 
ignorant of English as the more modern one of Greek ; and as 
the one produced the " Iliad " without any acquaintance with 
" Hamlet," I do not see why the other might not have produced 
" Hamlet " without any acquaintance with the " Iliad." John 



284 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

son tfas quite in the right in holding that, though the writings 
of Shakspeare exhibit " much knowledge, it is often such knowl- 
edge as books did not supply." He might have added further, 
that the knowledge they display, which books did supply, is of 
a kind which might be all found in English books at the time, 

— fully one-half of it, indeed, in the romances of the period. 
Every great writer, in the department in which he achieves 
his greatness, whether he be a learned Milton or an unlearned 
Burns, is self-taught. One stately vessel may require much 
tugging ere she gets fairly off the beach, whereas another may 
float off, unassisted, on the top of the flowing tide ; but when 
once fairly prosecuting their voyage in the open sea, both must 
alike depend on the spread sail and the guiding rudder, on the 
winds of heaven and the currents of the deep. 

On the opposite side of the lane, directly fronting the chapel, 
and forming the angle where lane and street unite, there is a 
plain garden-wall, and an equally plain dwelling-house ; and 
these indicate the site of Shakspeare's domicile, — the aristo- 
cratic, mansion, — one of the "greatest," it is said, in Stratford, 

— which the vagrant lad, who had fled the country in disgrace, 
returned to purchase for himself, when still a young man, — 
no longer a vagrant, however, and " well to do in the world." 
The poet's wildnesses could not have lain deep in his nature, 
or he would scarce have been a wealthy citizen of Stratford in 
his thirty-third year. His gardens extended to the river side, 

— a distance of some two or three hundred yards ; and doubt- 
less the greater part of some of his later dramas must have been 
written amid their close green alleys and straight-lined walks, 

— for they are said to have been quaint, rich, and formai, in 
accordance with the taste of the period ; and so comfortable a 
mansion was the domicile that, in 1643, Queen Henrietta, when 
i»t Stratford with the royalist army, made it her place of resi- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 285 

dcnce for three weeks. I need scarce tell its subsequent story. 
After passing through several hands, it was purchased, about 
the middle of the last century, by the Rev. Francis Gastrall, — 
a nervous, useless, ill-conditioned man, much troubled by a bad 
stomach and an unhappy temper. The poet's mulberry-tree 
had become ere now an object of interest ; and his reverence, 
to get rid of the plague of visiters, cut it down and chopped it 
into fagots. The enraged people of the town threw stones and 
broke his reverence's windows ; and then, to spite them still 
more, and to get rid of a poor-rate assessment to boot, he pulled 
down the poet's house. And so his reverence's name shares, 
in consequence, in the celebrity of that of Shakspeare, — " pur- 
sues the triumph and partakes the gale." The Rev. Francis 
Gastrall must have been, I greatly fear, a pitiful creature ; and 
the clerical prefix in no degree improves the name. 

The quiet street gets still quieter as one approaches the 
church. We see on either side a much greater breadth of 
garden-walls than of houses, — walls with the richly-fruited 
branches peeping over ; and at the churchyard railing, thickly 
overhung by trees, there is so dense a mass of foliage, that of 
the church, which towers so high in the distance, we can dis- 
cern no part save the door. A covered way of thick o'erarch- 
ing limes runs along the smooth flat gravestones from gateway 
to doorway. The sunlight was streaming this day in many a 
fantastic patch on the lettered pavement below, though the check- 
ering of shade predominated ; but at the close of the vista 
the Gothic door opened dark and gloomy, in the midst of broad 
sunshine. The Avon flows past the churchyard wall. One 
may drop a stone at arm's length over the edge of the parapet 
into four feet watej, and look down on shoals of tiny fish in play 
around the sedges. I entered the silent church, and passed 
along its rows of oil" oak pews, on to the chancel. The shad- 



286 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ows oi the trees outside were projected dark against the win- 
dows, and the numerous marbles of the place glimmered cold 
and sad in the thickened light. The chancel is raised a single 
step over the floor, — a step some twelve or fourteen inches in 
height; and, ranged on end along its edge, just where the 
ascending foot would rest, there lie three flat tombstones. One 
of these covers the remains of "William Shakspeare, Gentle- 
man;" the second, the remains of his wife, Anne Hathaway; 
while the third rests over the dust of his favorite daughter 
Susanna, and her husband John Hall. And the well-known 
monument — in paley tints of somewhat faded white lead — 
is fixed in the wall immediately above, at rather more than a 
man's height from the floor. 

At the risk of being deemed sadly devoid of good taste, I 
must dare assert that I better like the homely monumental 
bust of the poet, low as is its standing as a work of art, than all 
the idealized representations of him which genius has yet trans- 
ferred to marble or canvas. There is more of the true Shak- 
speare in it. Burns complained that the criticisms of Blair, if 
adopted, would make his verse " too fine for either warp or 
woof;" and such has been the grand defect of the artistic ideal- 
isms which have been given to the world as portraits of the 
dramatist. They make him so pretty a fellow, all redolent of 
poetic odors, "shining so brisk" and "smelling so sweet," like 
the fop that annoyed Hotspur, that one seriously asks if such a 
person could ever have got through the world. No such type 
of man, leaving Stratford penniless in his twenty -first year, 
would have returned in his thirty-third to purchase the " capi- 
tal messuage " of New Place, " with all the appurtenances," 
and to take rank rs-nid the magnates of his native town. The 
poet of the artist would never have Deen "William Shak- 
speare Gentleman, nor woTild his burying-ground have lain in 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 2S? 

the chancel of his parish church. About the Shakspeare of 
the stone bust, on the contrary, there is a purpose-like strength 
and solidity. The head, a powerful mass of brain, would 
require all Dr. Chalmers' hat; the forehead is as broad as that 
of the doctor, considerably taller, and of more general capacity ; 
and the whole countenance is that of a shrewd, sagacious, 
kindly-tempered man, who could, of course, be poetical when 
he willed it, — vastly more so, indeed, than anybody else, — 
but who mingled wondrous little poetry in the management 
of his every-day business. The Shakspeare of the stone bust 
could, with a very slight training, have been Chancellor of the 
Exchequer ; and in opening the budget, his speech would em- 
body many of the figures of Cocker, judiciously arranged, but 
not one poetical figure. 

On quitting the church, I walked for the better part of two 
miles upwards along the Avon, — first on the Stratford side to 
the stone bridge, which I crossed, and then on the side oppo- 
site, through quiet, low-lying meadows, bordered by fields. Up 
to the bridge the stream is navigable, and we may see the occa- 
sional sail gleaming white amid the green trees, as it glides 
past the resting-place of the poet. But on the upper side there 
are reaches through which even a slight shallop would have 
difficulty in forcing her way. The bulrush attains, in the soft 
oozy soil that forms the sides and bottom of the river, to a great 
size: I pulled stems from eight to ten feet in height; and in 
the flatter inflections, where the current stagnates, it almost 
chokes up the channel from side to side. Here it occurs in 
tall hedge-like fringes that line and overtop the banks, — there, 
ill island-like patches, in the middle of the stream, — yonder, 
in diffused transverse thickets, that seem to connect the fringes 
on the one side with the fringes on the other. I have rarely 
seen anything in living nature — nature recent and vital — 



288 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

that better enabled me to realize the luxuriant aquatic vegeta 
tion of the Coal Measures. The unbroken stream dimplen 
amid the rushes ; in the opener depths we may mark, as some 
burnished fly nutters along the surface, the sullen plunge of 
the carp; the eel, startled by the passing shadow, wriggles 
outward from its bank of mud ; while scores of careless gudg- 
eons, and countless shoals of happy minnows, dart hither and 
thither, like the congregated midges that dance unceasingly in 
the upper element, but a few inches over them. For the first 
mile or so, the trees which line the banks are chiefly old wil- 
low pollards, with stiff rough stems and huge bunchy heads. 
Shrubs of various kinds, chiefly, however, the bramble and the 
woody nightshade, have struck root atop into their decayed 
trunks, as if these formed so many tall flower-pots ; and we 
may catch, in consequence, the unwonted glitter of glossy black 
and crimson berries from amid the silvery leaves. The scenery 
improves as we ascend the stream. The willow pollards give 
place to forest trees, carelessly grouped, that preserve, unlopped 
and unmutilated, their proper proportions. But the main 
features of the landscape remain what they were. A placid 
stream, broadly befringed with sedges, winds in tortuous 
reaches through rich meadows ; and now it sparkles in open sun 
light, for the trees recede ; and anon it steals away, scarce seen, 
amid the gloom of bosky thickets. And such is the Avon, — 
Shakspeare's own river. Here must he have wandered in his 
boyhood, times unnumbered. That stream, with its sedges, 
and its quick glancing fins, — those dewy banks, with their 
cowslips and daffodils, — trees chance-grouped, exactly such as 
these, and to which these have succeeded, — must all have 
stamped their deep impress on his mind; and, when an unset- 
tled adventurer in London, they must have risen before him 
in all their sunshiny peacefulness, to inspire feelings of sadness 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 289 

and regret ; and when, in after days, he nad fou. d his true voca- 
tion, their loved forms and colors must have r.ingled with the 
tissue of his poetry. And here must he have walked in sober 
middle life, when fame and fortune had both been achieved, 
Happily to feel amid the solitude that there is but little of solid 
£ood in either, and that, even were it otherwise, the stream of 
life glides away to its silent bourn, from their gay light and 
their kindly shelter, to return no more forever. What would 
his thoughts have been, if, after spending in these quiet re- 
cesses hk fiftieth birth-day, he could have foreseen that the 
brief three score and ten annual revolutions, — few as certainly 
as evil, — which have so long summed up the term of man's 
earthly existence, were to be mulcted, in his case, of full seven- 
teen years ! 

How would this master of human nature have judged of the 
homage that has now been paid him for these two centuries? 
and what would have been his theory of " Hero Worship " ? 
Many a bygone service of this inverted religion has Stratford- 
on-Avon witnessed. The Jubilee devised by Garrick had no 
doubt much of the player in it; but it possessed also the real 
devotional substratum, and formed the type, on a splendid 
scale, not less in its hollowness than in its groundwork of real 
feeling, of those countless acts of devotion of which the poet's 
birth and burial places have been the scene. "Man praises 
man;" Garrick, as became his occupation, was a little more 
ostentatious and formal in his Jubilee services, — more studious 
of rich ceremonial and striking forms, — more High Church in 
spirit, — than the simpler class of hero-devotees who are con- 
tent to worship extempore; but that was just all. 

" He drew the Liturgy, and framed the rites 
And solemn ceremonial of the day, 
And called the world to worship on the banks 
25 



290 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Of Avon, famed in song. Ah ! pleasant proof 

That piety has still in human hearts 

Some place, a spark or two not yet extinct. 

The mulberry-tree was hung with blooming wreaths ; 

The mulberry-tree stood centre of the dance ; 

The mulberry-tree was hymned with dulcet airs ; 

And from his touchwood trunk the mulberry-tree 

Supplied such relics as devotion holds 

Still sacred, and preserves with pious care. 

So 'twas a hallowed time ; decorum reigned, 

And mirth without offence. No few returned 

Doubtless much edified, and all refreshed." 

Such was Cowper's estimate — to be sure, somewhat sarcas- 
tically expressed — of the services of the Jubilee. What 
would Shakspeare's have been of the deeply-based sentiment, 
inherent, it would seem, in human nature, in which the Jubi- 
lee originated ? An instinct so widely diffused and so deeply- 
implanted cannot surely be a mere accident; it must form, 
however far astray of the proper mark it may wander, one of 
the original components of the mental constitution, which we 
have not given ourselves. What would it be in its integrity ? 
It must, it would appear, have humanity on which to rest, — a 
nature identical with our own ; and yet, when it finds nothing 
higher than mere humanity, it is continually running, as in 
the case of the Stratford Jubilee, into grotesque idolatry. Did 
Shakspeare, with all his vast knowledge, know where its asp> 
rations could be directed aright? The knowledge seems to 
have got, somehow, into his family ; nay, she who appears id 
have possessed it was the much-loved daughter on whom his 
affections mainly rested, 

" Witty above her sexe ; but that 's not all, — 
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall." 

So says her epitaph in the chancel, where she sleeps fit thn 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 291 

i'eet of her father. There is a passage in the poet's will, too, 
written about a month ere his death, which may be, it is true, 
a piece of mere form, but which may possibly be something 
better. " I commend my soul into the hands of God my Crea- 
tor, hoping, and assuredly believing, through the only merits 
of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life ever- 
lasting." It is, besides, at least something, that this play- 
writer and play-actor, with wit at will, and a shrewd apprecia- 
tion of the likes and dislikes of the courts and monarchs he 
had to please, drew for their amusement no Mause Headriggs 
or Gabriel Kettled rummies. Puritanism could have been no 
patronizer of the Globe Theatre. Both Elizabeth and James 
hated the principle with a perfect hatred, and strove hard to 
trample it out of existence ; and such a laugh at its expense as 
a Shakspeare could have raised would have been doubtless a 
high luxury; nay, Puritanism itself was somewhat sharp and 
provoking in those days, and just a little coarse in its jokes, as 
the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts survive to testify ; but the dram- 
atist, who grew wealthy under the favor of Puritan-detesting 
monarchs was, it would seem, not the man to make reprisals. 
There are scenes in his earlier dramas, from which, as eternity 
neared upon his view, he could have derived little satisfaction ; 
but there is no " Old Mortality " among them. Had the poor 
player some sense of what his beloved daughter seems to have 
clearly discovered, — the true " Hero Worship " ? In his broad 
survey of nature and of man, did he mark one solitary charac- 
ter standing erect amid the moral waste of creation, untouched 
by taint of evil or of weakness, — a character infinitely too 
high for even his vast genius to conceive, or his profound com- 
prehension to fathom ? Did he draw near to inquire, and to 
wonder, and then fall down humbly to adore ? 

I took the evening coach for Warwick, on my way to Olney, 



292 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

and passed through the town for the railway station, a few 
minutes before sunset. It was a delightful evening, and the 
venerable castle and ancient town, with their surrounding 
woods and quiet river, formed in the red light a gorgeous 
picture. I could fain have waited for a day to explore Guy's 
Cliff, famous of old for its caves and its hermits, and to go 
over the ancient castle of king-making Warwick, — at once the 
most extensive and best preserved monument in the kingdom 
of the bygone feudal grandeur. The geology of the locality, 
ioo, is of considerable interest. From Stratford to the western 
suburbs of Warwick, the substratum of the landscape is com- 
posed, as every fallow-field which we pass certifies, in its flush 
of chocolate red, of the saliferous marls. Just, however, where 
the town borders on the country, the lower pavement of sand- 
stone, on which the marls rest, comes to the surface, and 
stretches away northward in a long promontory, along which 
we find cliffs and quarries, and altogether bolder features than 
the denuding agents could have sculptured out of the incohe- 
rent marls. Guy's Cliff, and the cliff on which Warwick Castle 
stands, are both composed of this sandstone. It is richer, too, 
in remains of vertebrate animals, than the Upper New Red 
anywhere else in England. It has its bone bed, containing, 
though in a sorely mutilated state, the remains of fish, chiefly 
teeth, and the remains of the teeth and vertebrae of saurians. 
The saurian of Guy's Cliff, with the exception of the saurian 
of the Dolomitic Conglomerate, near Bristol, is the oldest 
British reptile known to geologists. Time pressed, however; 
and leaving behind me the antiquities of Warwick, geologic 
and feudal, I took my seat in the railway train for the station 
nearest Olney, — that of Wolverton. And the night fell ere 
we had gone over half the way. 

1 had now had some little experience of railway travelling 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 293 

in England, and a not inadequate idea of the kind of quiet, 
comfortable-looking people whom I might expect to meet in a 
second-class carriage. But my fellow-passengers this evening 
were of a different stamp. They were chiefly, almost exclu- 
sively indeed, of the male sex, — vulgar, noisy, ruffian-like 
fellows, full of coarse oaths and dogged asseverations, and singu- 
larly redolent of gin ; and I was quite glad enough, when the 
train stopped at the Wolverton station, that I was to get rid of 
them. At Lie station, however, they came out en masse. All 
the other carriages disgorged similar cargoes ; and I found 
myself in the middle of a crowd that represented very unfairly 
the people of England. It was now nine o'clock. I had in- 
tended passing the night in the inn at Wolverton, and then 
walking on in the morning to Olney, a distance of nine miles ; 
but when I came to the inn, I found it all ablaze with light, and 
all astir with commotion. Candles glanced in every window ; 
and a thorough Babel of sound — singing, quarrelling, bell- 
ringing, thumping, stamping, and the clatter of mugs and glasses 
— issued from every apartment. I turned away from the door, 
and met, under the lee of a fence which screened him from 
observation, a rural policeman. "What is all this about?" I 
asked. — " Do you not know ? " was the reply. — " No ; I am 
quite a stranger here." — " Ah, there are many strangers here. 
But do you not know ?" — "I have no idea whatever," I reiter- 
ated : " I am on my way to Olney, and had intended spending 
the night here ; but would prefer walking on, to passing it in 
such a house as that." — " 0, beg pardon; I thought you had 
been one af themselves : Bendigo of Nottingham has challenged 
Caunt of London to fight for the championship. The battle 
comes on to-morrow, somewhere hereabouts ; and we have got 
all the blackguards in England, south and north, let loose upon 
us. If you walk on to Newport Pagnell, — just four miles, — 
25* 



294 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

v ou will no doubt get a bed ; but the way is lonely, and there 
have been a. ready several robberies since nightfall." — "I shall 
take my chance of that," I said. — H Ah,— well, — your best way, 
then, is to walk straight forwards, at a smart pace, keeping the 
middle of the highway, and stopping for no one." I thanked 
the friendly policeman, and took the road. It was a calm, 
pleasant night; the moon, in her first quarter, was setting dim 
and lightless in the west ; and an incipient frost; in the form 
of a thin film of blue vapor, rested in the lower hollows. 

The way was quite lonely enough ; nor were the few strag- 
gling travellers whom I met of a kind suited to render its soli- 
tariness more cheerful. About half way on, where the road 
runs between tall hedges, two fellows started out towards me, 
one from each side of the way. " Is this the road," asked one, 
" to Newport Pagnell ? " — " Quite a stranger here," I replied, 
without slackening my pace ; " don't belong to the kingdom 
even." — "No! " said the same fellow, increasing his speed, as 
if to overtake me ; " to what kingdom, then ? " — " Scotland," I 
said, turning suddenly round, somewhat afraid of being taken 
from behind by a bludgeon. The two fellows sheered off in 
double quick time, the one who had already addressed me 
muttering, " More like an Irishman, I think ; " and I saw no 
more of them. I had luckily a brace of loaded pistols about 
me, and had at the moment a trigger under each fore-finger ; 
and though the ruffians — for such I doubt not they were — 
c )uld scarcely have been cognizant of the fact, they seemed to 
Vave made at least a shrewd approximation towards it. In the 
autumn of 1842, during the great depression of trade, when the 
entire country seemed in a state of disorganization, and the law 
in some of the mining districts failed to protect the lieges, I 
was engaged in following out a course of geologic exploration in 
our Lothian Coal Field; and, unwilling to suspend my labors, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 295 

had got the pistols^ to do for myself, if necessary, what the 
authorities at the time could not do for me. But I had fortu- 
nately found no use for them, though I had visited many a lonely 
hollow and little-frequented water-course, — exactly the sort of 
places in which, a century ago, one would have been apt to 
raise footpads as one now starts hares ; and in crossing the 
borders, I had half resolved to leave them behind me. They 
gave confidence, however, in unknown neighborhoods, or when 
travelling alone in the night-time ; and so I had brought them 
with me into England, to support, if necessary, the majesty of 
the law and the rights of the liege subject ; and certainly did 
not regret this evening that I had. 

I entered Newport Pagnell a little after ten o'clock, and 
found all its inns exactly such scenes of riot and uproar as the 
inn at Wolverton. There was the same display of glancing 
lights in the windows, and the same wild hubbub of sound. 
On I went. A decent mechanic, with a white apron before 
him, whom I found in the street, assured me there was no 
chance of getting a bed in Newport Pagnell, but that I might 
possibly get one at Skirvington, a village on the Olney road, 
about three miles further on. And so, leaving Newport Pag- 
nell behind me, I set out for Skirvington. It was now wearing 
late, and I met no more travellers : the little bit of a moon had 
been down the hill for more than an hour, the fog rime had 
thickened, and the trees by the wayside loomed through the 
clouds like giants in dominos. In passing through Skirvington, 
I had to stoop down and look between me and the sky for sign- 
posts. There were no lights in the houses, save here and theie 
in an upper casement ; and all was quiet as in a churchyard. 
By dint of sky-gazing, I discovered an inn, and rapped hard at 
the door. It was opened ty the landlord, sans coat and waist- 
coat. There was no bed o be had there, he said ; the beds 



296 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

were all occupied by travellers who could get no accommodation 
in Newport Pagnell ; but there was another inn in the place 
further on, though it was n't unlikely, as it did n't much busi- 
ness, the family had gone to bed. This was small comfort. 
1 had, however, made up my mind, that if I failed in finding 
entertainment at inn the second, I should address myself to 
hay-rick the first; but better fortune awaited me. I sighted 
my way to the other sign-post of the village : the lights within 
had gone up stairs to the attics ; but as I tapped and tapped, 
one of them came trippingly down ; it stood pondering behind 
the door for half a second, as if in deliberation, and then bolt 
and bar were withdrawn, and a very pretty young English- 
woman stood in the door- way. " Could I get accommodation 
there for a night, — supper and bed ? " There was a hesitating 
glance at my person, followed by a very welcome " yes ; " and 
thus closed the adventures of the evening. On the following 
morning I walked on to Olney. It was with some little degree 
of solicitude that, in a quiet corner by the way, remote from 
cottages, I tried my pistols, to ascertain what sort of defence 1 
would have made had the worst come to the worst in the 
encounter of the previous evening. Pop, pop ! — they went off 
beautifully, and sent their bullets through an inch board ; and 
so in all probability I would have succeeded in astonishing the 
" fan:y-men." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 297 



CHAPTER XV. 

Cjwper; his skigv.lar Magnanimity of Character ; Argument furnished by 
his latter Religims History against the Selfish Philosophy. — Valley 
of the Ouse. — Approach to Olney. — Appearance of the Town. — Cow- 
per's House ; Parlor ; Garden. — Pippin-tree planted by the Poet. — 
Summer-house written within and without. — John Tawell. — Delightful 
Old Woman. — Weston-Underwood. — Thomas Scott's House. — The 
Park of the Throckmortons. — Walk described in " The Task." — Wil- 
derness. — Ancient Avenue. — Alcove ; Prospect which it commands, 
as drawn by Cowper. — Colonnade. — Rustic Bridge. — Scene of the 
" Needless Alarm." — The Milk Thistle. 

Olney ! Weston-Underwood ! Yardley-Chase ! the banks of 
the Ouse, and the park of the Throckmortons ! Classic ground 
once more, — the home and much-loved haunts of a sweet and 
gentle, yet sublimely heroic nature, that had to struggle on in 
great unhappiness with the most terrible of all enemies, — the 
obstinate unreasoning despair of a broken mind. Poor Cowper ! 
There are few things more affecting in the history of the 
species than the Heaven-inspired magnanimity of this man. 
Believing himself doomed to perish everlastingly, — for such 
was the leading delusion of his unhappy malady, — he yet 
made it the grand aim of his enduring labors to show forth the 
merzy and goodness of a God who, he believed, had no mercy 
for him, and to indicate to others the true way of salvation, — 
deeming it all the while a way closed against himself. Such, 
surely, is not the character or disposition of the men destined 
to perish. We are told by his biographers that the well-known 
hymn, in which he celebrates the "mysterious way" in which 
"Godwo*ks" to "perform his wonders." was written at the 



298 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

close of the happj period which intervened between the first 
and second attack of his cruel malady; and that what sug- 
gested its composition were the too truly interpreted indica- 
tions of a relapse. His mind had been wholly restored to him ; 
he had been singularly happy in his religion: and he had 
striven earnestly, as in the case of his dying brother, to bring 
others under its influence. And now, too surely feeling that 
his intellect was again on the eve of being darkened, he deemed 
the providence a frowning one, but believed in faith that there 
was a " smiling face " behind it. In his second recovery, 
though his intellectual stature was found to have greatly 
increased, — as in some racking maladies the person of the 
patient becomes taller, — he never enjoyed his whole mind. 
There was a missing faculty, if faculty I may term it : his well- 
grounded hope of salvation never returned. It were presump- 
tuous to attempt interpreting the real scope and object of the 
afflictive dispensation which Cowper could contemplate with 
such awe ; and yet there does seem a key to it. There is 
surely a wondrous sublimity in the lesson which it reads. The 
assertors of the selfish theory have dared to regard Christian- 
ity itself, in its relation to the human mind, as but one of the 
higher modifications of the self-aggrandizing sentiment. May 
we not venture to refer them to the grief-worn hero of Olney, 
— the sweet poet who first poured the stream of Divine truth 
into the channels of our literature, after they had been shut 
against it for more than a hundred years, — and ask them 
whether it be in the power of sophistry to square his motives 
with the ignoble conclusions of their philosophy? 

Olney stands upon lie Oolite, on the northern side of the 
valley of the Ouse, anc I approached it this morning from the 
south, ac oss the valley Let the reader imagine a long green 
ri';bon of lat meadow, aid down in the middle of the land- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 299 

scape like a web on x bleaching green, only not quite so 
straightly drawn out. It is a ribbon about half a mile in 
breadth, and it stretches away lengthwise above and below, far 
as the eye can reach. There rises over it on each side a gentle 
line of acclivity, that here advances upon it in flat promonto- 
ries, there recedes into shallow bays, and very much resembles 
the line of a low-lying but exceedingly rich coast; for on both 
sides, field and wood, cottage and hedge-row, lie thick as the 
variously tinted worsteds in a piece of German needlework ; 
the flat ribbon in the midst is bare and open, and through it 
there winds, from side to side, in many a convolution, as its 
appropriate pattern, a blue sluggish stream, deeply fringed on 
both banks by an edging of tall bulrushes. The pleasantly 
grouped village directly opposite, with the long narrow bridge 
in front, and the old handsome church and tall spire rising in 
the midst, is Olney; and that other village on the same side, 
about two miles further up the stream, with the exceedingly 
lofty trees rising over it, — trees so lofty that they overhang 
the square tower of its church, as a churchyard cypress over- 
hangs a sepulchral monument, — is Weston- Underwood. In 
the one village Cowper produced " The Task;" in the other he 
translated " Homer." 

1 crossed the bridge, destined, like the " Brigs of Ayr," and 
the " Bridge of Sighs," long to outlive its stone and lime exist- 
ence ; passed the church, — John Newton's ; saw John New- 
ton's house, a snug building, much garnished with greenery ; 
and then entered Olney proper, — the village that was Olney a 
hundred years ago. Unlike most of the villages of central 
England, it is built, not of brick, but chiefly at least of a calca- 
reous yellow stone from the Oolite, which, as it gathers scarce 
any lichen or moss, looks clean and fresh after the lapse of cen- 
turies ; and it is not until the eye catches the dates on the 



300 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

peaked gable points, 1682, 1611, 1590, that one can regard the 
place as no hastily run up town of yesterday, but as a place 
that had a living in other times. The main street, which is 
also the Bedford road, broadens towards the middle of the vil- 
lage into a roomy angle, in shape not very unlike the capacious 
pocket of a Scotch housewife of the old school : one large elm 
tree rises in the centre ; and just opposite the elm, among the 
houses which skirt the base of the angle, — i. e. the bottom of 
the pocket, — we see an old-fashioned house, considerably 
taller than the others, and differently tinted ; for it is built of 
red brick, somewhat ornately bordered with stone. And this tall 
brick house was Cowper's home for nineteen years. It con- 
tains the parlor, which has become such a standard paragon of 
snugness and comfort, that it will need no repairs in all the 
future ; and the garden behind is that in which the poet reared 
his cucumbers and his Ribston pippins, and in which he 
plied hammer and saw to such excellent purpose, in converting 
his small greenhouse into a summer sitting-room, and in mak- 
ing lodging-houses for his hares. He dated from that tall 
house not a few of the most graceful letters in the English 
language, and matured, from the first crude conceptions to the 
last finished touches, " Truth," " Hope," " The Progress of 
Error," " Retirement," and " The Task." I found the famed 
parlor vocal with the gabble of an infant school : carpet and 
curtains were gone, sofa and bubbling urn : and I saw, instead, 
but a few deal forms, and about two dozen chubby children, 
whom all the authority of the thin old woman, their teacher, 
could not recall to diligence in the presence of the stranger. 
The walls were sorely soiled, and the plaster somewhat broken; 
there was evidence, too, that a partition had been removed, 
and that the place was roomier by one-half than when Cowper 
and Mrs. Unwin used to sit down in it to their evening tea. 



ENGLAND AND ITS TEOPLE. 301 

Rut at least one interesting feature had remained unchanged. 
There is a small pert-hole in the plaster, framed by a narrow 
facing of board; ail through this port-hole, cut in the parti- 
tion for the express purpose, Cowper's hares used to come leap- 
ing out to their evening gambols on the carpet. I found the 
garden, like the house, much changed. It had been broken up 
into two separate properties ; and the proprietors having run a 
wall through the middle of it, one must now seek the pippin- 
tree which the poet planted in one little detached bit of gar- 
den, and the lath-and-plaster summer-house, which, when the 
weather was fine, used to form his writing-room in another. 
The Ribston pippin looks an older-like tree, and has more 
lichen about it, though far from tall for its age, than might be 
expected of a tree of Cowper's planting ; but it is now seventy- 
nine years since the poet came to Olney, and in less than 
seventy-nine years young fruit-trees become old ones. The lit- 
tle summer-house, maugre the fragility of its materials, is in a 
wonderfully good state of keeping : the old lath still retains the 
old lime ; and all the square inches and finger-breadths of the 
plaster, inside and out, we find as thickly covered with names 
as the space in our ancient Scotch copies of the " Solemn 
League and Covenant." Cowper would have marvelled to 
have seen his little summer-house, — for little it is, — scarce 
larger than a four-posted bedstead, — written, like the roll 
described in sacred vision, " within and without." It has still 
around it, in its green old age, as when it was younger and less 
visited, a great profusion of flowering shrubs and hollyhocks ; 
we see from its window the back of honest John Newton's 
house, much enveloped in wood, with the spire of the church 
rising over; and on either side there are luxuriant orchards, in 
which the stiffer forms of the fruit-trees are relieved by lines 
of graceful poplars. Some of the names on the plaster are not 
26 



302 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

particularly classical. My conductress pointed to one signa- 
ture, in especial, which was, she said, an object of great curi- 
osity, and which a "most respectable person," - — "just after 
the execution" — had come a day's journey to see. It was 
that of the hapless "John Tawell, Great Birkenstead, Hants, ' 
who about two years ago was hung for the murder of his mis- 
tress. It had been added to the less celebrated names, for so 
the legend bore, on the "21st day of seventh month 1842;" 
and just beside it some kind friend of the deceased had added, 
by way of postscript, the significant hieroglyphic of a minute 
human figure, suspended on a gibbet, with the head rather 
uncomfortably twisted awry. 

I had made several unsuccessful attempts to procure a guide 
acquainted with the walks of the poet, and had inquired of my 
conductress (an exceedingly obliging person, I may mention, — 
housekeeper of the gentleman to whom the outermost of the 
two gardens belongs), as of several others, whether she knew 
any one at once willing and qualified to accompany me for 
part of the day in that capacity. But she could bethink her- 
self of nobody. Just, however, as we stepped out from the gar- 
den into the street, there was an old woman in a sad-colored 
cloak, and bearing under the cloak a bulky basket, passing by. 
" !" said the housekeeper, " there is just the person that 
knows more about Cowper than any one else. She was put to 
school, when a little girl, by Mrs. Unwin, and was much about 
her house at Weston-Underwood. Gossip, gossip ! come hither." 
And so I secured the old woman as my guide ; and we set out 
together for Weston and the pleasure-grounds of the Throck- 
mortons. She was seventy-one, she said ; but she walked every 
day with her basket from Weston-Underwood to Olney, — 
sometimes, indeed, twice in the day, — to shop and market for 
her neighbors. She had now got a basket of fresh herrings, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 303 

which were great rarities in these parts, and it behooved her 
to get them delivered : but she would then be quite free to 
accompany me to all the walks in which she had seen Squire 
Cowper a hundred and a hundred times, — to the " Peasant's 
Nest," and the "alcove," and the "avenue," and the "rustic 
bridge," and the " Wilderness," and " Yardley oak," and, ir. 
short, anywhere or everywhere. I could not have been more in 
luck : my delightful old woman had a great deal to say : she 
w r ould have been equally garrulous, I doubt not, had Cowper 
been a mere country squire, and Mrs. Unwin his housekeeper; 
but as he chanced to be a great poet, and as his nearer friends 
had, like the planets of a central sun, become distinctly visible, 
from their proximity, by the light which he cast, and were evi- 
dently to remain so, her gossip about him and them I found 
vastly agreeable. The good Squire Cowper ! she said, — 
well did she remember him, in his white cap, and his suit 
of green turned up with black. She knew the Lady Hesketh 
too. A kindly lady was the Lady Hesketh ; there are few such 
ladies now-a-days : she used to put coppers into her little vel- 
vet bag every time she went out, to make the children she met 
happy ; and both she and Mrs. Unwin were remarkably kind 
to the poor. The road to Weston-Underwood looks down 
upon the valley of the Ouse. "Were there not water-lilies in 
the river in their season ? " I asked ; " and did not Cowper 
sometimes walk out along its banks ? " — "0 yes," she replied ; 
" and I remember the dog Beau, too, who brought the lily 
ashore to him. Beau was a smart, petted little creature, with 
silken ears, and had a good deal of red about him." 

My guide brought me to Cowper's Weston residence, a hand- 
some, though, iike the Olney domicile, old-fashioned house, 
still in a state of good repair, with a whitened many-windowed 
front, and tall steep roof flagged with stone ; and I whiled 



304 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

away some twenty minutes or so in the street before it, while 
my old woman went about dispersing her herrings. Weston. 
Underwood, as villages go, must enjoy a rather quiet, do-noth- 
ing sort of existence, for in all that time not a passenger 
went by. The houses — steep-roofed, straw-thatched, stone- 
built erections, with the casements of their second stories lost 
in the eaves — straggle irregularly on both sides of the road, 
as if each house had an independent will of its own, and was 
somewhat capricious in the exercise of it. There is a profu- 
sion of well-grown, richly-leaved vines, trailed up against their 
walls : the season had been unfavorable, and so the grapes, in 
even the best bunches, scarcely exceeded in size our common 
red currants ; but still they were bona fide vines and grapes, 
and their presence served to remind one of the villages of sun- 
nier climates. A few tall walls and old gateway columns min- 
gle with the cottages, and these are all that now remain of the 
mansion-house of the Throckmortons. One rather rude-look- 
ing cottage, with its upper casement half hid in the thatch, is 
of some note, as the scene of a long struggle in a strong rug- 
ged mind, — honest, but not amiable, — which led ultimately 
to the production of several useful folios of solid theology. In 
that cottage a proud Socinian curate studied and prayed him- 
self, greatly against his will, into one of the soundest Calvinists 
of modern times : it was for many years the dwelling-place of 
Thomas Scott ; and his well-known narrative, " The Force of 
Truth," forms a portion of his history during the time he lived 
in it. The road I had just travelled over with the woman was 
that along which John Newton had come, in the January of 
1774, to visit, in one of these cottages, two of Scott's parish- 
ioners, — a dying man and woman ; and the Socinian, who had 
not visited them, was led to think seriously, for the first time, 
th.it he had a duty as a clergyman which he failed to perform. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 305 

It wis along the same piece of road, some three years later, 
that Scott used to steal, when no longer a Socinian, but still 
wofully afraici of being deemed a Methodist, to hear Newton 
preach. There were several heaps of stones lying along the 
street, — the surplus materials of a recent repair, — that seemed 
to have been gathered from the neighboring fields, but had 
been derived, in the first instance, from some calcareous grit 
of the Oolite ; and one of these lay opposite the windows of 
Cowpers mansion. The first fragment I picked up contained 
a well-narked Plagiostoma; the second, a characteristic frag- 
ment of a Pecten. I bethought me of Cowper's philippic on 
the earlier geologists, which, however, the earlier geologists too 
certainly deserved, for their science was not good, and their 
theology wretched ; and I indulged in, I dare say, something 
approaching to a smile. Genius, when in earnest, can do a 
great deal ; but it cannot put down scientific truth, save now 
and then for a very little time, and would do well never to try. 
My old woman had now pretty nearly scattered over the 
neighborhood her basket of herrings; but she needed, she 
said, just to look in upon her grandchildren, to say she was 
going to the woodlands, lest the poor things should come to 
think they had lost her ; and I accompanied her to the cot- 
tage. It was a humble low-roofed hut, with its earthen floor 
sunk, as in many of our Scottish cottages, a single step below 
the level of the lane. Her grandchildren, little girls of seven 
and nine years, were busily engaged with their lace bobbins : 
the younger was working a piece of narrow edging, for her 
breadth of attainment in the lace department extended as yet 
over only a few threads ; whereas the elder was achieving a 
little belt of open-work, with a pattern in it. They were or- 
phans, and P ved with their poor grandmother, and she was a 
widow. Wo regained the street, and then, passing through a 
26* 



306 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

dilapidated gateway, entered the pleasure-grounds, — the scene 
of the walk so enchantingly described in the opening book of 
" The Task." But, before taking up in detail the minuter 
features of the place, I must attempt communicating to the 
reader some conception of it as a whole. 

The road from Olney to Weston-Underwood lies parallel to 
the valley of the Ouse, at little more than a field's breadth up 
the slope. On its upper side, just where it enters Weston, 
there lies based upon it (like the parallelogram of a tyro geom- 
etrician, raised on a given right line) an old-fashioned rect- 
angular park, — that of the Throckmortons, — about half a mile 
in breadth by about three-quarters of a mile in length. The 
sides of the enclosure are bordered by a broad belting of very 
tall and very ancient wood ; its grassy area is mottled by nu- 
merous trees, scattered irregularly ; its surface partakes of the 
general slope ; it is traversed by a green valley, with a small 
stream trotting along the bottom, that enters it from above, 
nearly about the middle of the upper side, and that then, cut- 
ting it diagonally, passes outwards and downwards towards 
the Ouse through the lower corner. About the middle of the 
park this valley sends out an off-shoot valley, or dell rather, 
towards that upper corner furthest removed from the corner by 
which it makes its exit ; the off-shoot dell has no stream a-bot- 
tom, but is a mere grassy depression, dotted with trees. It 
serves, however, with the valleys into which it opens, so to break 
the surface of the park that the rectangular formality of the 
lines of boundary almost escape notice. Now, the walk de- 
scribed in " The Task " lay along three of the four sides of this 
parallelogram. The poet, quitting the Olney road at that 
lower corner where the diagonal valley finds egress, struck up 
along the side of the park, turned at the nearer upper corner, 
and passed througr the belting of wood that runs along the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 307 

top; tu\n:d again at the further upper corner, and, coming 
down on Weston, joined the Olney road just where it enters 
the village. After first quitting the highway, a walk of two 
furlongs or so brought him abreast of the " Peasant's Nest ; " 
after the first turning atop, and a walk of some two or three 
furlongs more, he descended into the diagonal valley, just 
where it enters the park, crossed the rustic bridge which spans 
the stream at the bottom, marked the doings of the mole, and 
then ascended to the level on the other side. Near the second 
turning he found the alcove, and saw the trees in the stream- 
less dell, as if " sunk, and shortened to their topmost boughs ;" 
then, coming down upon Weston, he passed under the " light 
and graceful arch " of the ancient avenue ; reached the " Wil- 
derness " as he was nearing the village ; and, emerging from 
the thicket full upon the houses, saw the " thrasher at his 
task," through the open door of some one of the barns of the 
place. Such is a hard outline, in road-map fashion, of the 
walk which, in the pages of Cowper, forms such exquisite 
poetry. I entered it somewhat unluckily to-day at the wrong 
end, commencing at the western corner, and passing on along 
its angles to the corner near Olney, thus reversing the course 
of Cowper, for my old woman had no acquaintance with " The 
Task," or the order of its descriptions ; but, after mastering the 
various scenes in detail, I felt no difficulty in restoring them to 
the integrity of the classic arrangement. 

On first entering the park, among the tall forest-trees that, 
viewed from the approach to Olney, seem to overhang the vil- 
lage and its church, one sees a square, formal corner, sepa- 
rated from the opener ground by a sunk dry-stone fence, within 
which the trees, by no means lofty, are massed as thickly 
together as saplings in a nursery-bed run wild, or nettles in a 
neglected burying-grnund. There are what seem sepulchral 



308 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

urns among the thickets of this enclosure; and sepulchral urns 
they are, — raised, however, to commemorate the burial-places, 
not of men, but of beasts. Cowper in 1792 wrote an epitaph 
for a favorite pointer of the Throckmortons ; and the family, 
stirred up by the event, seem from that period to have taken a 
dog-burying bias, and to have made their Wilderness the cem- 
etery ; for this square enclosure in the corner, with its tangled 
thickets and its green mouldy urns, is the identical Wilderness 
of " The Task," 

" Whose well-rolled walks, 

With curvature of slow and easy sweep, — 

Deception innocent, — give ample space 

To narrow bounds." 

One wonders at the fortune that assigned to so homely and 
obscure a corner — a corner which a nursery-gardener could 
get up to order in a fortnight — so proud and conspicuous a 
niche in English literature. We walk on, however, and find 
the scene next described greatly more worthy of the celebrity 
conferred on it. In passing upwards, along the side of the 
park, we have got into a noble avenue of limes, — tall as York 
Minster, and very considerably longer, for the vista diminishes 
till the lofty arch seems reduced to a mere doorway; the 
smooth glossy trunks form stately columns, and the branches, 
int'ilacing high over head, a magnificent roof. 

" How airy and how light the graceful arch, 
Yet awful as the consecrated roof 
Reechoing pious anthems ! while beneath 
The checkered earth seems restless as a flood 
Brushed by the wind. So sportive is the light 
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance, 
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick, 
And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves 
Play wanton e^ery moment, every spot." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 309 

What rxquisite description ! And who, acquainted with 
Cowper, ever walked in a wood when the sun shone, and the 
wind ruffled the leaves, without realizing it ! It was too dead 
a calm to-day to show me the dancing light and shadow where 
the picture had first been taken : the feathery outline of the 
foliage lay in diluted black, moveless on the grass, like the 
foliage of an Indian-ink drawing newly washed in ; but all 
else was present, just as Cowper had described half a century 
before. Two minutes' walk, after passing through the avenue, 
brought me to the upper corner of the park, and " the proud 
alcove that crowns it," — for the " proud alcove " does still 
crown it. But time, and the weather, and rotting damps, seem 
to be working double tides on the failing pile, and it will not 
crown "♦ long. The alcove is a somewhat clumsy erection of 
wood and plaster, with two squat wooden columns in front, of 
a hybrid order between the Tuscan and Doric, and a seat 
within. A crop of dark-colored mushrooms cherished by the 
damp summer had shot up along the joints of the decaying 
floor ; the plaster, flawed and much stained, dangled from the 
ceiling in numerous little bits, suspended, like the sword of 
old, by single hairs ; the broad deal architrave had given way 
at one end, but the bolt at the other still proved true ; and so it 
hung diagonally athwart the two columns, like the middle bar 
of a gigafitic letter N. The "characters uncouth" of the 
" rural carvers " are, however, still legible ; and not a few 
names have since been added. This upper corner of the park 
forms its highest ground, and the view is very fine. The 
streamless dell — not streamless always, however, for the poet 
describes the urn of its little Naiad as filled in winter — lies 
immediately in front, and we see the wood within its hollow 
recesses, as if "sunk, and shortened to the topmost boughs." 
The gree- undulating surface of the park, still more deeply 



310 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

grooved ir. the distance by the diagonal valley, and mottled 
with trees, stretches away beyond to the thick belting of tall 
wood below. There is a wide opening, just where the valley 
opens, — a great gap in an immense hedge, — that gives access 
to the further landscape ; the decent spire of John Newton's 
church rises, about two miles away, as the central object in 
the vista thus formed ; we see in front a few silvery reaches of 
the Ouse ; and a blue uneven line of woods that runs along 
the horizon closes in the prospect. The nearer objects within 
the pale of the park, animate and inanimate, — the sheepfold 
and its sheep, the hay-wains, empty and full, as they pass and 
repass to and from the hay-field, — the distinctive characters 
of the various trees, and their shortened appearance in the 
streamless valley, — occupy by much the larger part of Cow- 
per's description from the alcove ; while the concluding five 
lines afford a bright though brief glimpse of the remoter pros- 
pect, as seen through the opening. But I must not withhold 
the description itself, — at once so true to nature and so instinct 
with poetry, — familiar as it must prove to the great bulk of 
my readers. 

"Now roves the eye ; 
And, posted on this speculative height, 
Exults in its command. The sheepfold here 
Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe. 
At first, progressive as a stream, they seek 
The middle field ; but, scattered by degrees, 
Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land. 
There from the sunburnt hay-field homeward creeps 
The loaded wain ; while, lightened of its charge, 
The wain that meets it passes swiftly by, 
The boorish driver leaning o'er his team, 
Vociferous and impatient of delay. 
Nor less attractive is the woodland scene, 
Diversified Avith trees of various growth, 
Alike yet various. Here the gray smooth trunks 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 311 

Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine 
Within the twilight of their distant shades ; 
There, lost behind a rising ground, the wood 
Seems sunk, and shortened to its topmost boughs. 
No tree in all the grove but has its charms, 
Though each its hue peculiar ; paler some, 
And of a wannish gray ; the willow such, 
And poplar, that with silver lines his leaf, 
And ash far stretching his umbrageous arm ; 
Of deeper green the elm ; and deeper still, 
Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak. 
Some glossy-leaved, and shining in the sun, 
The maple, and the beech of oily nuts 
Prolific, and the lime at dewy eve 
Diffusing odors : nor unnoted pass 
The sycamore, capricious in attire, 
Now gi-een, now tawny, and, ere autumn yet 
Have changed the woods, in scarlet honors bright. 
O'er these, but for beyond (a spacious map 
Of hill and valley interposed between) , 
The Ouse, dividing the well-watered land, 
Now glitters in the sun, and now retires, 
As bashful, yet impatient to be seen." 

Quitting the alcove, we skirt the top of the park of the 
Throckmortons, on a retired grassy walk that runs straight as 
a tightened cord along the middle of the belting which forms 
the park's upper boundary, — its enclosing hedge, if 1 may so 
speak without offence to the dignity of the ancient forest-trees 
which compose it. There is a long line of squat broad-stemmed 
chestnuts on either hand, that fling their interlacing arms 
athwart the pathway, and bury it, save where here and there 
the sun breaks in through a gap, in deep shade ; but the roof 
overhead, unlike that of the ancient avenue already described, 
is not the roof of a lofty nave in the light, florid style, tut of 
a low-browed, thickly-ribbed Saxon crypt, flanked by ponder- 
ous columns, of dwarfish stature, but gigantic strength. And 



312 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

this double tier of chestnuts, extended along the park-top from 
corner to corner, is the identical " length ot colonnade " eulo- 
gized by Cowper in " The Task" : — 

" Monument of ancient taste, 
Now scorned, but worthy of a better fate ; 
Our fathers knew the value of a screen 
From sultry suns ; and, in their shaded walks 
And long-protracted bowers, enjoyed at noon 
The gloom and coolness of declining day. 
Thanks to Benevolus, — he spares me yet 
These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines ; 
And, though himself so polished, still reprieves 
Their obsolete prolixity of shade." 

Half-way on, we descend into the diagonal valley, — " but cau- 
tious, lest too fast," — just where it enters the park from the 
uplands, and find at its bottom the " rustic bridge." It was 
rustic when at its best, — an arch of some four feet span or so, 
built of undressed stone, fenced with no parapet, and covered 
over head by a green breadth of turf; and it is now both rustic 
and ruinous to boot, for one-half the arch has fallen in. The 
stream is a mere sluggish runnel, much overhung by hawthorn 
bushes : there are a good many half-grown oaks scattered 
about in the hollow; while on either hand the old massy 
chestnuts top the acclivities. 

Leaving the park at the rustic bridge, by a gap in the fence, 
my guide and I struck outwards through the valley towards 
the uplands. We had*left, on crossing the hedge, the scene 
of the walk in "The Task;" but there is no getting away in 
this locality from Cowper. The first field we stepped into 
" adjoining close to Kilwick's echoing wood," is that described 
in the "Needless Alarm;" and we were on our way to visit. 
" Yardley oak." The poet, conscious of his great wealth in 
the pictorial, was no niggard in description ; and so the field, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 313 

though not very remarkable for anything, has had its picture 
drawn. 

"A narrow brook, by rushy banks concealed, 
Runs in a bottom and divides the field ; 
Oaks intersperse it that had once a head, 
But now wear crests of oven-wood instead ; 
And where the land slopes to its watery bourn, 
Wide yawns a gulf beside a ragged thorn. 
Bricks line the sides, but shivered long ago, 
And horrid brambles intertwine below ; 
A hollow scooped, I judge, in ancient time, 
For baking earth or burning rock to lime." 

r lhe " narrow brook " here is that which, passing downwards 
into the park, runs underneath the rustic bridge, and flows 
towards the Ouse through the diagonal valley. The field 
itself, which lies on one of the sides of the valley, and presents 
rather a steep slope to the plough, has still its sprinkling of 
trees; but the oaks, with the oven-wood crests, have nearly all 
disappeared ; and for the "gulf beside the thorn," I could find 
but a small oblong, steep-sided pond, half overshadowed by an 
ash-tree. Improvement has sadly defaced the little field since 
it sat for its portrait; for though never cropped in Squire Cow- 
per's days, as the woman told me, it now lies, like the ordinary 
work-day pieces of ground beyond and beside it, in a state of 
careful tillage, and smelt rank at the time of a flourishing 
turnip crop. "0," said the woman, who for the last minute 
had been poking about the hedge for something which she 
could not find, " do you know that the Squire was a beautiful 
drawer? " — " I know that he drew," I replied ; " but I do not 
know that his drawings were fine ones. I have in Scotland a 
great book filled with the Squire's letters ; and I have learned 
from it, that ere he set himself to write his long poems, he 
used to draw ' mountains and valleys, and ducks and dab- 
27 



314 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

chicks,' and that he threatened to charge his friends at the 
rate of a halfpenny a piece for them." — ''Ah," said the 
woman, " but he drew grandly, for all that ; and I have just 
been looking for a kind of thistle that used to grow here, — but 
the farmer has, I find, weeded it all out, — that he made many 
fine pictures of. I have seen one of them with Lady Hesketh, 
that her ladyship thought very precious. The thistle was a 
pretty thistle, and I am sorry they are all gone. It had a deep 
red flower, set round with long thorns ; and the green of the 
leaves was crossed with bright white streaks." I inferred from 
the woman's description that the plant so honored by Cowper's 
pencil must have been the " milk thistle," famous in legendary 
lore for bearing strong trace on its leaves of gbssy green of 
the milk of the Virgin Mother, dropped on it it the flight to 
Egypt. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 315 



CHAPTER XVI. 

Yardley Oak; of immense Size and imposing Appears nee. — Cowper's 
Description singularly illustrative of his complete Mastery over Lan- 
guage. — Peasant's Nest. — The Poet's Vocation peculiarly one of 
Revolution. — The School of Pope ;. supplanted in its unproductive Old 
Age hy that of Cowper. — Cowper's Coadjutors in the Work. — Econ- 
omy of Literary Revolution. — The old English Yeoman. — Quit Olney. 
— Companions in the Journey. — Incident. — Newport Pagnell. — Mr. 
Bull and the French Mystics. — Lady of the Fancy. — Champion of all 
England. — Pugilism. — Anecdote. 

Half an hour's leisurely walking — and, in consideration 
of my companion's three score and eleven summers, our walk- 
ing was exceedingly leisurely — brought us, through field and 
dingle, and a country that presented, as we ascended, less of 
an agricultural and more of a pastoral character, to the woods 
of Yardley Lodge. We enter through a coppice on a grassy 
field, and see along the opposite side a thick oak wood, with a 
solitary brick house, the only one in sight, half hidden amid 
foliage in a corner. The oak wood has, we find, quite a char- 
acter of its own. The greater part of its trees, still in their 
immature youth, were seedlings within the last forty years : 
they have no associates that bear in their well-developed pro- 
portions, untouched by decay, the stamp of solid mid-aged tree 
hood ; but here and there, — standing up among them, like the 
'ong-lived sons of Noah, in their old age of many centuries, 
amid a race cut down to the three score and ten, — we find 
some of the most ancient oaks in the empire, — trees that were 
trees in the days of William the Conqueror. These are mere 
hollow trunks, of vast bulk, but stinted foliage, in which the 



316 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

fox shelters am the owl builds, — mere struldbrugs of the for- 
est. The bulkiest and most picturesque among their number 
we find marked by a white-lettered board: it is a hollow pol- 
lard of enormous girth, twenty-eight feet five inches in circum 
ference a foot above the soil, with skeleton stumps, bleached 
vvhite by the winters of many centuries, stretching out for a few 
inches from amid a ragged drapery of foliage that sticks close 
to the body of the tree, and bearing on its rough gray bole 
wens and warts of astounding magnitude. The trunk, leaning 
slightly forward, and wearing all its huger globosities behind, 
seems some fantastic old-world mammoth, seated kangaroo- 
fashion on its haunches. Its foliage this season had caught a 
tinge of yellow, when the younger trees all around retained 
their hues of deep green; and, seen in the bold relief which it 
owed to the circumstance, it reminded me of iEneas' golden 
branch, glittering bright amid the dark woods of Cumea. And 
such is Yardley oak, the subject of one of the finest descrip- 
tions in English poetry, — one of the most characteristic, too, 
Df the muse of Cowper. If asked to illustrate that peculiar 
power which he possessed above all modern poets, of taking 
the most stubborn and untractable words in the language, and 
bending them with all ease round his thinking, so as to fit its 
every indentation and irregularity of outline, as the ship-carpen- 
ter adjusts the stubborn planking, grown flexible in his hand, 
to the exact mould of his vessel, I would at once instance some 
parts of the description of Yardley oak. But farewell, noble 
tree ! so old half a century ago, when the poet conferred on 
thee immortality, that thou dost not seem older now ! 



" Time made thee what thou wast, — king of the woods ; 
And Time hath made thee what thou art, — a cave 
For owls to roost in. Once thy spreading boughs 
O'erhung the champaign ; and the numerous flocks 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 317 

That grazed it stood beneath that ample cope 

Uncrowded, yet safe sheltered from the storm. 

No flock frequents thee now. Thou hast outlived 

Thy popularity, and art become 

(Unless verse rescue thee a while) a thing 

Forgotten as the foliage of thy youth. 

While thus through all the stages thou hast pushed 

Of treeship, — first a seedling hid in grass ; 

Then twig ; then sapling ; and, as century rolled 

Slow after century, a giant bulk 

Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root 

Upheaved above the soil, and sides embossed 

With prominent wens globose, — till, at the last, 

The rottenness, which time is charged to inflict 

On other mighty ones, found also thee." 

- returned with my guide to the rustic brdge ; resumed my 
walk through the hitherto unexplored half of the chestnut 
colonnade; turned the corner; and then, passing downwards 
along the lower side of the park, through neglected thickets, — 
the remains of an extensive nursery run wild, — I struck out- 
wards beyond its precincts, and reached a whitened dwelling- 
house that had been once the " Peasant's Nest." But nowhere 
else in the course of my walk had the hand of improvement 
misimproved so sadly. For the hill-top cottage, 

" Environed wi'h a ring of branchy elms 
That overhung the thatch," 

I found a modern hard-cast farm-house, with a square of offices 
attached, all exceedingly utilitarian, well kept, stiff, and diss*, 
greeable. It was sad enough to find an erection that a jour- 
neyman brbklayer could have produced in a single month 
substituted for the " peaceful covert " Cowper had so often* 
wished his own, and which he had so frequently and fondly 
visited. But those beauties of situation which awakened the 
27* 



318 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

admiration, and even half excited the envy, of the poet, 
improvement could not alter; and so they are now what they 
ever were. The diagonal valley to which I have had such 
frequent occasion to refer is just escaping from the park at its 
lower corner: the slope, which rises from the runnel to the 
level, still lies on the one hand within the enclosure ; but it has 
escaped fr;m it on the other, and forms, where it merges into 
the higher grounds, the hill-top on which the " Nest " stands ; 
and the prospect, no longer bounded by the tall belting of the 
park, k at once very extensive and singularly beautiful. 

" Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain 
Of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled o'er, 
Conducts the eye along its sinuous course 
Delighted. There, fast-rooted in their bank, 
Stand, never overlooked, our favorite elms, 
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut ; 
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream, 
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale, 
The sloping land recedes into the clouds, 
Displaying on its varied side the grace 
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square towers, 
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells 
Just undulates upon the listening ear, 
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote." 

Leaving the farm-house, I descended into the valley ; passed 
along a tangled thicket of yew, plane and hazel, in which I 
lingered a while to pick blackberries and nuts, where Cowper 
may have picked them ; came out upon the Olney road by the 
wicket gate through which he used to quit the highway and 
strike up to the woodlands ; and, after making my old woman 
particularly happy by a small gratuity, returned to Olney. 

I trust it will not be held that my descriptions of this old- 
fashioned park, with its colonnade and its avenues, its della 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 319 

and its dingles, its alcove and its wilderness, have been too 
minute. It has an interest as independent of any mere beauty 
or picturesqueness which it may possess, as the field of Ban- 
nockburn or the meadows of Runnimede. It indicates the 
fulcrum, if I may so speak, on which the lever of a great orig- 
inal genius first rested, when it upturned from its foundations 
an effete school of English verse, and gave to the literature of 
ihe country a new face. Its scenery, idealized into poetry, 
wrought one of the greatest literary revolutions of which the 
history of letters preserves any record. The school of Pope, 
originally of but small compass, had sunk exceedingly low ere 
the times of Cowper : it had become, like Nebuchadnezzar's 
tree, a brass-bound stump, that sent forth no leafage of refresh- 
ing green, and no blossoms of pleasant smell ; and yet, for con- 
siderably more than half a century, it had been the only exist* 
ing English school. And when the first volume of "Poems 
by William Cowper, Esq., of the Inner Temple," issued from 
the press, there seemed to be no prospect whatever of any other 
school rising to supplant it. Several writers of genius had 
appeared in the period, and had achieved for themselves a 
standing in literature ; nor were they devoid of the originality, 
in both their thinking and the form of it, without which no 
writer becomes permanently eminent. But their originality 
was specific and individual, and terminated with themselves : 
whereas the school of Pope, whatever its other defects, was ol 
a generic character. A second Collins, a second Gray, a sec 
ond Goldsmith, would have been mere timid imitators, — mere 
mock Paganim s, playing each on the one exquisite string of 
his master, and serving by his happiest efforts but to establish 
the fidelity of the imitation. But the poetry of Pope formed 
an instrument of larger compass and a more extensive gamut, 
and left the disciples room to achieve for themselves, in run- 



320 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ning over the notes of their master, a certain amount of origin 
ality. Lyttelton's " Advice to Belinda," and Johnson's " Lon- 
don," exhibit the stamp of very different minds; and the 
" Pursuits of Literature " is quite another sort of poem from the 
•' Triumphs of Temper ; " but they all alike belong to the 
school of Pope, and bear the impress of the " Moral Essays," 
the " Satires," or the " Rape of the Lock." The poetical 
mind of England had taken an inveterate set ; it had grown up 
into artificial attitudes, like some superannuated posture-maker, 
and had lost the gait and air natural to it. Like the painter 
in the fable, it drew its portraits less from the life than from 
cherished models and familiar casts approved by the connois- 
seur ; and exhibited nature, when it at all exhibited it, through 
a dim haze of colored conventionalities. And this school, 
grown rigid and unfeeling in its unproductive old age, it was 
part of the mission of Cowper to supplant and destroy. He re- 
stored to English literature the wholesome freshness of nature, 
and sweetened and invigorated its exhausted atmosphere, by 
letting in upon it the cool breeze and the bright sunshine. The 
old park, with its noble trees and sequestered valleys, were to 
him what the writings of Pope and of Pope's disciples were to 
his contemporaries : he renewed poetry by doing what the first 
poets had done. 

It is not uninteresting to mark the plan on which nature 
delights to operate in producing a renovation of this character 
in the literature of a country. Cowper had two vigorous coad- 
jutors in the work of revolution ; and all three, though essen- 
tially unlike in other respects, resembled one another in the 
preliminary course through which they were prepared for their 
proper employment. Circumstances had conspired to throw 
them all outside the pale of the existing literature. Cowper, 
at the r.pe age of thirty-three, when breathing in London the 



ENGLAND AND TTS PEOPLE. 321 

literary atmosphere of the day, amid his friends, — the Lloyds, 
Colmans, and Bonnel Thorntons, — was a clever and tasteful 
imitator, but an imitator merely, both in his prose and his verse. 
His prose in " The Connoisseur " is a feeble echo of that of 
Addison; while in his verse we find unequivocal traces of 
Prior, of Philips, and of Pope, but scarce any trace whatever 
of a poet at least not inferior to the best of them, — Cowper 
himself. Events over which he had no control suddenly 
removed him outside this atmosphere, and dropped him into a 
profound retirement, in which for nearly twenty years he did 
not peruse the works of any English poet. The chimes of the 
existing literature had fairly rung themselves out of his head, 
ere, with a heart grown familiar in the interval with all earnest 
feeling, — an intellect busied with ever ripening cogitation, — 
an eye and ear conversant, day after day, and year after year, 
with the face and voice of nature, — he struck, as the key- 
notes of his own noble poetry, a series of exquisitely modulated 
tones, that had no counterparts in the artificial gamut. Had 
his preparatory course been different, — had he been kept in 
the busy and literary world, instead of passing, in his insulated 
solitude, through the term of second education, which made 
him what we all know, — it seems more than questionable 
whether Cowper would have ever taken his place in literature 
as a great original poet.^ His two coadjutors in the work of 

* Cowper himself seems to have been thoroughly aware that his long 
seclusion from the world of letters told in his favor. " I reckon it among 
my principal advantages as a composer of verses," we find him saying, in 
one of his letters to the younger Unwin, " that I have not read an English 
poet these thirteen years, and but one these twenty years. Imitation 
even of the best models is my aversion. It is servile and mechanical, — 
a trick that has enabled many to usurp the name of author, who could not 
have written at all, if they had not written upon the pattern of some one 
indeed erigin.il. But when the ear and taste have been much accustomed 



322 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

literary revolution were George Crabbe and Robert Burns. 
The one, self-taught, and wholly shut out from the world of 
letters, laid in hi* vast stores of observation, fresh from nature 
in an obscure fishing village on the coast of Suffolk ; the other 
educated in exactly the same style and degree, — Crabbe had 
a little bad Latin, and Burns a little bad French, — and equally 
secluded from the existing literature, achieved the same im- 
portant work on the bleak farm of Mossgiel. And the earlier 
compositions of these three poets, — all of them true backwoods- 
men in the republic of letters, — clearers of new and untried 
fields in the rich unopened provinces, — appeared within five 
years of each other — Crabbe's first and Burns' last. This 
process of renovating a worn-out literature does certainly seem 
a curious one. Circumstances virtually excommunicated three 
of the great poetic minds of the age, and flung them outside 
the literary pale ; and straightway they became founders of 
churches of their own, and carried away with them all the 
people. 

Cowper, however, was better adapted by nature, and more 
prepared by previous accomplishment, for the work of literary 
revolution, than either Burns or Crabbe. His poetry — to 
return to a previous illustration, rather, however, indicated than 
actually employed — was in the natural what Pope's was in 
the artificial walk, — of a generic character ; whereas theirs 
was of a strongly specific cast. The writers who have followed 
Crabbe and Burns we at once detect as imitators ; whereas the 
writers to whom Cowper furnished the starting note have 
attained to the dignity of originals. He withdrew their atten- 
tion from the old models, — thoroughly commonplaced by 

to the manner of others, it is almost impossible to avoid it; and we imi- 
tate in spite of ourselves, just in proportion as we admire." (Corre- 
spondznce, 17S1.) 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 323 

reproduction, — and sent them out into the fields and the 
woods with greatly enlarged vocabularies, to describe new things 
in fresh language. And thus has he exercised an indirect but 
potent influence on the thinking and mode of description of 
poets whose writings furnish little or no trace of his peculiar 
style or manner. Even in style and manner, however, we dis- 
cover in his pregnant writings the half-developed germs of after 
schools. In his lyrics we find, for instance, the starting notes 
of not a few of the happiest lyrics of Campbell. The noble ode 
"On the Loss of the Royal George" must have been ringing 
in the ears of the poet who produced the " Battle of the Baltic ; " 
and had the " Castaway " and the " Poplar Field " been first 
given to the world in company with the " Exile of Erin " and 
the " Soldier's Dream," no critic could have ever suspected that 
they had emanated from quite another pen. We may find 
similar traces in his works of the minor poems of the Lake 
School. " The Distressed Travellers, or Labor in Vain ; " 
" The Yearly Distress, or Tithing-Time ; " " The Colubriad ; " 
" The Retired Cat ; " " The Dog and the Water Lily ; " and 
" The Diverting History of John Gilpin," — might have all 
made their first appearance among the " Lyrical Ballads," and 
would certainly have formed high specimens of the work. But 
it is not form and manner that the restored literature of Eng- 
land mainly owes to Cowper, — it is spirit and life; not so 
much any particular mode of exhibiting nature, as a revival of 
the habit of looking at it. 

I had selected as my inn at Olney a quiet old house, kept 
by a quiet old man, who, faithful to bygone greatness, con- 
tinued to sell his ale under the somewat faded countenance of 
the late Duke of York. On my return, I found him smoking 
a pipe, in his clean, tile-paved kitchen, with a man nearly as 
old as himself, but exceedingly vigorous for his years, — a flesh- 



324 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

colored, square-shouldered, deep-chested, English-looking man, 
with good sense and frank good-humor broadly impressed on 
every feature. The warm day and the long walk had rendered 
me exceedingly thirsty : I had been drinking, as I came along, 
at every runnel ; and I now asked the landlord whether he 
could not get me something to slake my drought less heady 
than his ale. " 0," said his companion, taking from his pocket 
half a dozen fine jargonelle pears, and sweeping them towards 
me across the old oak table, " these are the things for your 
thirst." I thanked him, and picked out of the heap a single 
pear. " 0," he exclaimed, in the same tone of refreshing 
frankness, " take all, take all ; they are all of my own rearing ; 
I have abundance more on my trees at home." With so pro- 
pitious a beginning, we were soon engaged in conversation. 
He was, as I afterwards learned from my host, a very worthy 
man, Mr. Hales, of Pemberton, the last, or nearly the last, of 
the race of old English yeomen in this part of the country. 
His ancestors had held their small property of a few fields for 
centuries, and he continued to hold it still. He well remem- 
bered Cowper, he told me ; Newton had left Olney before his 
day, some sixty-five or sixty -six years ago ; but of Thomas 
Scott he had some slight recollection. The connection of these 
men with the locality had exerted, he said, a marked influence 
on the theologic opinions and beliefs of the people ; and there 
were few places in England, in consequence, in which the 
Puseyistic doctrines had made less way. The old parishioners 
of Newton and Scott, and the town's folk and neighbors of 
Cowper, had felt, of course, an interest in their writings ; and 
so there were more copies of the " Poems," and the " Cardi- 
phonia," and the " Force of Truth," and the " Essays," scattered 
over the place, than over perhaps any other locality in England. 
And so the truth was at least known in Olney, and its neigh- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 325 

borhood, whatever use might be made of it I inquired 
whether he had ever heard of one Moses Brown, who had been 
curate in Olney exactly a hundred years before, — a good man, 
i poet, and a friend of James Hervey, and whose poems, 
descriptive and devotional, though not equal by a great deal to 
those of CWper, had passed through several editions in their 
day. Mr. Hales had barely heard that such a man there had 
been, and had some recollection of an aged woman, one of his 
daughters. I parted from the old frank yeoman, glad I should 
have seen so fine a specimen of a class fast hastening to extinc- 
tion. The reader will remember that Gulliver, in the island 
of the sorcerers, when the illustrious dead were called up to 
hold converse with him, had the curiosity to summon, among 
the rest, a few English yeomen of the old stamp, — " once so 
famous," says the satirist, " for the simplicity of their manners, 
diet, and dress, — for justice in their dealings, — for their true 
spirit of liberty and love of their country." And I deemed 
myself somewhat in luck in having found a representative of 
the class still in the land of the living, considerably more than 
a century after Swift had deemed it necessary to study his 
specimens among the dead. 

After exhausting the more interesting walks of the place, I 
quitted Olney next morning for the railway, by an omnibus 
that plies daily between Bedford and Wolverton. There were 
two gentlemen in the vehicle. The one dressed very neatly 
in black, with a white neck-cloth and somewhat prim-looking 
beaver hat, I at once set down as a Dissenting minister ; the 
other, of a rather more secular cast, but of staid and sober 
aspect, might, I inferred, be one of his deacons or elders. 
They were engaged, as I entered, in discussing some theologi- 
cal question which they dropped, however, as we drove on 
through the street, and evinced a curiosity to know where 
28 



326 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Newton and Thomas Scott had lived. I pointed out to them 
the house of Cowper, and the house and church of Newton ; 
and, in crossing the famous bridge over the Ouse, directed 
their attention to the distant village of Weston-XJnderwood, in 
which Scott had officiated for many years as a curate. And so 
I got fairly into their good graces, and had my share assigned 
me in the conversation. They discussed Newton and Scott, 
and characterized as sound and excellent the " Commentary " 
of the one and the " Letters " of the other ; but the labors of 
Cowper, whose rarer genius, and intellect of finer texture, seemed 
removed beyond the legitimate range of their appreciation, 
they regarded apparently as of less mark and importance. I 
deemed them no inadequate representatives of a worthy sec- 
tion of the English people, and of an obvious power in the 
country, — a power always honestly and almost always well 
directed, but rather in obedience to the instincts of a wise relig- 
ion than the promptings of a nicely-discriminating intelligence. 
The more secular-looking traveller of the two, on ascertaining 
that I had come from Edinburgh, and was a citizen of the 
place, inquired whether I was not a parishioner of Dr. Chal- 
mers, — the one Scotchman, by the way, with whose name I 
found every Englishman of any intelligence in some degree 
acquainted ; and next, whether I was not a member of the 
Free Church. The Disruption both gentlemen regarded as a 
great and altogether extraordinary event. They knew almost 
nothing of the controversy which had led to it ; but there was 
no mistaking the simple fact of which it was an embodiment, 
namely, that from four to five hundred ministers of the Estab- 
lished Church had resigned their livings on a point of prin- 
ciple. To this effect, at least, the iron tongue of rumor had 
struck with no uncertain sound ; and the tones were of a kind 
suited not to lower the aspirations of the religious sentiment. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 327 

nor to cast a shade of suspicion on its reality as a principle of 
conluct. 

In the middle of a weary asceni immediately over the old 
yeoman's hamlet of Pemberton, the horse that dragged us 
fairly stood still : and so we had to get out and walk ; and 
though we paced over the ground quite leisurely enough, both 
vehicle and driver were left far behind ere we got to the top 
of the hill. We paused, and paused, and sauntered on for a 
few hundred yards at a time, and then paused again and again ; 
and still no omnibus. At length, the driver came puffing up 
behind us afoot, on the way to Newport Pagnell, he said, for 
another " hanimal," for his " poor hoss " had foundered on that 
"cussed hill." My fellow-traveller, the presumed deacon, 
proved considerably more communicative than his companion 
the minister. He had, I found, notwithstanding his gravity, 
some town-bred smartness about him, and was just a little 
conceited withal; or, I should perhaps rather say, was not 
quite devoid of what constitutes the great innate impression of 
the true Englishman, — an impression of his own superiority } 
simply in virtue of his country, over all and sundry who speak 
his language with an accent not native to the soil. But I 
never yet quarrelled with a feeling at once so comfortable and 
so harmless, and which the Scotch — though in a form less 
personal as it regards the individual entertaining it, and with 
an eye more to Scotland in the average — cherish as strongly ; 
and so the Englishman and I agreed during our walk excel- 
lently well. He had unluckily left his hat in the vehicle, 
bringing with him instead, what served as his coach-cap, a 
pinched Glengary bonnet, which, it must be confessed, looked 
nearly as much out of place on his head as Captain Knock- 
dunder's cocked hat, trimmed with gold lace, when mounted 
high over philabeg and plaid, on the head of the redoubted 



328 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

captain. And on nearing the village of Skirvington, he 
seemed to feel that the bonnet was not the sort of head-dress in 
which a demure Englishman looked most himself. " It might 
do well enough for a Scotchman like me," he said, " but not 
so well for him." I wore, by chance, a tolerably good hat, and 
proposed making a temporary exchange, until we should have 
passed the village ; but fate declared itself against the trans- 
action. The Englishman's bonnet would have lain, we found, 
like a coronet upon a cushion on the Scotch head ; and the 
Scotch hat, on the other hand, threatened to swallow up the 
Englishman. I found myself in error in deeming him an ac- 
quaintance of our fellow-traveller the minister : he did not even 
know his name, and was exceedingly anxious to find it out, — 
quite fidgety on the point ; for he was., he said, a profoundly 
able man, and, he was certain, a person of note. At the inn at 
Newport Pagnell, however, he succeeded, I know not how, in 
ferreting the name out ; and whispered into my ear, as we went, 
that he was assured he was in the right in deeming our com- 
panion somebody: the gentleman in black beside us was no 

other than Dr. . But the doctor's name was wholly 

unfamiliar to me, and I have since forgotten it. 

Newport Pagnell ! I had but just one association with the 
place, besides the one formed as I had passed through its streets 
two evenings before, on the night of riot and clamor : it had 
been for many years the home of worthy, witty, bluff William 
Bull, — the honest Independent minister who used so regularly 
to visit poor Cowper in his affliction, ere Cowper had yet 
become famous, and whom the affectionate poet learned so 
cordially to love. How strangely true genius does brighten up 
whatever object it falls upon ! It is, to borrow from Sir Wal- 
ter's illustration, the playful sunbeam, that, capriciously select- 
ing some little bit of glass or earthen ware in the middle of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 329 

a ploughed field, renders it visible across half a country, by 
the light which it pours upon it. An old astronomer, ere the 
heavens had been filled up with their fantastic signs, — crabs, 
and fish, and scorpions, bulls and rams, and young ladies, and 
locks of young ladies' hair, — could give a favorite toy or pet 
companion a place in the sky ; but it is only the true poet who 
possesses an analogous power now. He can fix whatever 
bauble his fancy rests upon high in the literary heavens ; and 
no true poet ever exercised the peculiar privilege of his order 
more sportively than Cowper. He has fixed Mr. Bull's tobacco- 
box and his pipe amid the signs, and elicited many a smile by 
setting the honest man a-smoking high up in the moon. Bur 
even to the moon his affection followed him, as may be seen 
from the characteristic passage, glittering, as is Cowper's wont, 
with an embroidery of playful humor, inwrought into a sad- 
colored groundwork of melancholy, in which he apostro- 
phizes the worthy minister in his new lodgment. "Mon 
aimable and tres cher ami, — it is not in the power of chaises 
or chariots to carry you where my affections will not follow 
you. If I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the 
moon, I should not love you the less, but should contemplate 
the place of your abode as often as it appeared in the heavens, 
and say, ' Farewell, my friend, forever ! Lost, but not for- 
gotten ! Live happy in thy lantern, and smoke the remainder 
of thy pipes in peace. Thou art rid of earth, — at least, of all 
its cares, — and so far can I rejoice in thy removal ; and as to 
the cares that are to be found in the moon, I am resolved to 
suppose them lighter than those below, — heavier they can 
hardly be.' " 

Cowper's translations of the better devotional poems of 
Madame Guion were made at the request of Mr. Bull, who, 
though him&elf a Calvinist, was yet so great an admirer of 
2S* 



330 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the mystic Frenchwoman, — undoubtedly sincere, though not 
always judicious, in her devotional aspirations, — that he trav- 
elled on one occasion twenty miles to see her picture. He 
urged him, too, during that portion of partial convalescence 
in which his greater poetical works were produced, again to 
betake himself to the composition of original hymns ; but it 
was the hour of the power of darkness, and this second request 
served but to distress the mind of the suffering poet. He had 
" no objection," he said, " to giving the graces of the foreigner 
an English dress," but " insuperable ones to affected exhibi- 
tions of what he did not feel." — "Ask possibilities," he adds, 
" and they shall be performed ; but ask no hymns from a man 
suffering from despair, as I do. I could not sing the Lord's 
song, were it to save my life, banished as I am, not to a strange 
land, but to a remoteness from His presence, in comparison 
with which the distance from east to west is no distance, — is 
vicinity and cohesion." Alas, poor Cowper! — sorely smitten 
by the archers, and ever carrying about with him the rankling 
arrow in the wound. It is not improbable that one of the 
peculiar doctrines of the Mystics, though it could scarce have 
approved itself to his judgment, may have yet exercised a 
soothing influence on the leading delusion of his unhappy 
malady ; and that he may have been all the more an admirer 
of the writings of Madame Guion, — for a great admirer he 
was, — in consequence of her pointed and frequent allusion 
to it It was held by the class of Christians to which she 
belonged, — among the rest, by Fenelon, — that it would be 
altogether proper, and not impossible, for the soul to acquiesce 
in even its own destruction, were it to be God's will that it 
should be destroyed. We find the idea brought strongly out in 
one of the poems translated by Cowper ; but it is in vain now 
to inquire respecting the mirod of strangely-mingled thought 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 331 

and feel'ng, — of thought solid and sane, and of acute feeling, 
quickened by oadness, — in which he must have given to it its 
first embodiment in Eng.ish verse. 

" Yet He leaves me, — cruel fate ! 
Leaves me in my lost estate. 
Have I sinned ? 0, say wherein ; 
Tell me, and forgive my sin ! 
King and Lord, whom I adore, 
Shall I see thy face no more ? 
Be not angry ; I resign 
Henceforth all my will to thine : 
I consent that Thou depart, 
Though thine absence breaks my heart. 
Go, then, and forever too ; 
All is right that Thou wilt do." 

A mile beyond Skirvington, when we had almost resigned 
ourselves to the hardship of walking over all the ground which 
we had bargained for being carried over, we were overtaken by 
the omnibus drawn by the " fresh hoss." It stopped for a few 
seconds as we entered Newport Pagnell, to pick up a passen- 
ger ; and a tall, robust, hard-featured female, of some five- 
and-forty or so, stepped in. Had we heard, she asked, when 
adjusting herself with no little bustle in a corner of the con- 
veyance, — had we heard how the great fight had gone ? No ! 
— my two companions had not so much as heard that a great 
fight there had been. " dear!" exclaimed the robust female, 
" not heard that Bendigo challenged Caunt for the champion- 
ship! — ay, and he has beaten him too. Three hundred guineas 
a-side ! " — "Bad work, I am afraid," said the gentleman in 
black. — " Yes," exclaimed the robust female ; "bad work, foul 
work ; give 'em fair play, and Bendigo is no match for Caunt. 
Hard stiff fellow, though ! But there he is ! " We looked out 
in the direction indicated, and saw the champion of all Eng* 



332 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

land standing- at a public -house door, with a large white patch 

over one eye, and a deep purple streak under the other. He 

reminded me exceedingly of Bill Sikes, in the illustrations by 

Cruikshank of Oliver Twist. For two mortal hours had he 

stood up, under the broiling sun of the previous day, to knock 

down, and be knocked down in turn, all in a lather of blood 

and sweat, and surrounded by a ring of the greatest scoundrels 

in the kingdom. And the ninety-third round had determined 

him the best man of two, and the champion of all England. I 

felt convinced, however, like the old king in the ballad, that 

England holds 

"Within its realme, 
Five hundred as good as hee." 

There had been sad doings in the neighborhood, — not a little 
thieving in the houses, several robberies on the highway, and 
much pocket-picking among the crowds ; in short, as the re- 
porter of a sporting paper, " The Era," who seemed to have 
got bitten somehow, summed up his notice of the fight, — 
"had the crowds brought together been transported en masse 
to Botany Bay, they would have breathed forth such a moral 
pestilence as would have infected the atmosphere of the place. 
Pugilism has been described. as one of the manifestations of 
English character and manners. I suspect, however, that in 
the present day it manifests nothing higher than the unmiti- 
gated blackguardism of England's lowest and most disrepu- 
table men. Regarding the English ladies who take an interest 
in it, I must of course venture nothing untender ; indeed, I 
saw but a single specimen of the class, and that for but twenty 
minutes or so, for the robust female left us at the first stage. 

A pugilist, notwithstanding his pugilism, may be, I doubt 
not, a brave fellow; the bottom he displays is, in most instances, 
the identical quality which, in the desperate tug of war, so dis- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 333 

tinguishes, over all the other troops of Europe, the British 
soldier. Bat the "science of defence" can have in itself no 
tendency either to strengthen native courage, or to supply the 
want of it. It must take its place rather among those artificial 
means of inspiring confidence, that, like the bladders of the 
swimmer, serve but to induce a state of prostration and help- 
lessness when they unexpectedly give way ; and can be but an 
indifferent preparation for meeting full in front the bayonet- 
point that breaks in upon its guards, or the whizzing bullet 
that beats them down. I have been told by an aged relative, 
now deceased, who saw much service, that in the first great 
naval battle in which he was engaged, and the first great storm 
he experienced, there were two men — one in each instance — 
whose cowardice was palpable and apparent to the whole crew, 
and who agreed so far in character, that each was the champion 
pugilist and bully of his vessel. The dastard in the engage- 
ment — that of Camperdown — was detected coiling up his 
craven bulk in a place of concealment, out of reach of the 
shot : the dastard in the storm was rendered, by the extreme- 
ness of his terror, unfit for duty. The vessel in which my 
relative sailed at the time — the same relative who afterwards 
picked up the curious shell amid the whistling of the bullets 
in Egypt — was one of those old-fashioned, iron-fastened ships 
of the line that, previous to the breaking out of the first revo- 
lutionary war, had been lying in dock for years, and that, care- 
fully kept, so far at least as externals were concerned, looked 
extremely well when first sent to sea, but proved miserable 
weather-boats amid the straining of a gale, when their stiff 
rusty bolting began to slacken and work out. The gale, in 
this especial instance, proved a very tremendous one ; and the 
old Magnificent went scudding- before it, far into the Northern 
Ocean, under bare poles. She began to open in the joints and 



334 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

seams like a piece of basket-work; and though the pumps were 
plied incessantly by half-hour relays, the water rose fast within 
the hold, and she threatened to settle down. My relative was 
stationed in the well-room during one of the night-watches, just 
as the tempest had reached its crisis, to take note of the state 
of the leakage ; and a man came round every quarter of an 
hour to receive his report. The water, dimly visible by the 
lantern of horn, rose fast along the gauge, covering, inch after 
inch, four feet and a half, — four feet nine, — five feet, — five 
feet three, — five feet and a half: the customary quarter of an 
hour had long elapsed, yet no one appeared to report ; and the 
solitary watcher, wondering at the delay, raised the little hatch 
directly above head, and stepped out upon the orlop, to repre- 
sent the state of matters below. Directly over the opening, a 
picture of cold, yellow terror, petrifying into stone, stood the 
cowed bruiser, with a lantern dangling idly from his finger 
points. "What make you here?" asked my relative. — "Come 
to report." — "Report! is that reporting?" — "O!! — how 
many feet water?" — "Five and a half." — "Five feet and 
a half!" exclaimed the unnerved bully, striking his hands 
together, and letting his lantern fall into the open hatch, — 
" Five feet and a half ! Gracious heaven ! it 's all over with 
us ! " Nothing, I have oftener than once heard my relative 
remark, so strongly impressed him, during the terrors of the 
gale, as the dread-impressed features i nd fear-modulated tones 
of that unhappy man. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 335 



CHAPTER XVII. 

Cowper and the Geologists. — Geology in the Poet's Days \t z State of 
great Immaturity. — Case different aow. — Folly of committing the 
Bible to a False Science. — Galileo. — Geologists at one in all their 
more important Deductions ; vast Antiquity of the Earth one of these. 
— State of the Question. — Illustration. — Presumed Thickness of the 
Fossiliferous Strata. — Peculiar Order of their Organic Contents ; of 
their Fossil Fish in particular, as ascertained by Agassiz. — The Geo- 
logic Races of Animals entirely different from those which sheltered 
with Noah in the Ark. — Alleged Discrepancy between Geologic Fact 
and the Mosaic Record not real. — Inference based on the opening 
Verses of the Book of Genesis. — Parallel Passage adduced to prove 
the Inference unsound. — The Supposition that Fossils may have been 
created such examined : unworthy of the Divine Wisdom ; contrary to 
the Principles which regulate Human Belief ; subversive of the grand 
Argument founded on Design. — The profounder Theologians of the Day 
not Anti-Geologists. — Geologic Fact in reality of a kind fitted to per- 
form important Work in the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed ; 
subversive of the " Infinite-Series " Argument of the Atheist ; subver- 
sive, too, of the Objection drawn by Infidelity from an Astronomical 
Analogy. — Counter-objection. — Illustration. 

It may have been merely the effect of an engrossing study 
long prosecuted, but so it was, that of all I had witnessed amid 
the scenes rendered classic by the muse of Cowper, nothing 
more permanently impressed me than a few broken fossi's of 
the Oolite which I had picked up immediately opposite the 
poet's windows. There had they lain, as carelessly indifferent 
to the strictures in " The Task," as the sun in the central 
heavens, two centuries before, to the denunciations of the In- 
quisition. Geology, however, in the days of Cowper, had not 
attained to the dignity of a science. It lacked solid footing as 
it journeyed amid the wastes of Chaos ; and now tipped, as 



336 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

with its toe-points, a " crude consistence " of ill-understood 
facts, and now rose aloft into an atmosphere of obscure conjec- 
ture, on a "tumultuous cloud" of ill-digested theory. In a 
science in this unformed, rudimental stage, whether it deal 
with the stars of heaven or the strata of the earth, the old 
anarch of Infidelity is sure always to effect a transitory lodg- 
ment; and beside him stand his auxiliaries, 

" Rumor, and Chance, 
And Tumult, and Confusion, all embroiled, 
And Discord with, a thousand various mouths." 

And so it is in no degree derogatory to the excellent sense of 
Cowper, that he should have striven to bring Revelation in 
direct antithetical collision with the inferences of the geologists. 
There exists, however, no such apology for the Dean Cock- 
burns and London "Records" of the present day. Geology, 
though still a youthful science, is no longer an immature one : 
it has got firm footing on a continent of fact ; and the man who 
labors to set the doctrines of Revelation in array against its 
legitimate deductions, is employed, whatever may be his own 
estimate of his vocation, not on the side of religious truth, but 
of scepticism and infidelity. His actual work, however excel- 
lent his proposed object, is identically that of all the shrewder 
infidels, — the Humes, Volneys, Voltaires, and Bolingbrokes, — 
who have compassed sea and land, and pressed every element 
into their service, in attempting to show that the facts and doc- 
trines of the Bible traverse those great fixed laws which regu- 
late human belief. No scientific question was ever yet settled 
dogmatically, or ever will. If the question be one in the sci- 
ence of numbers, it must be settled arithmetically ; if in the sci- 
ence of geometry, it must be settled mathematically ; if in the 
science of chemistry, it must be settled experimentally. The 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 337 

Church of Rome strove hard, in the days of Galileo, .0 settle 
an astronomical question theologically ; and did its utmost to 
commit the Bible to the belief that the earth occupies a central 
position in the system, and that the sun performs a daily revo- 
lution around it: but the astronomical question, maugre the 
Inquisition, refused to be settled other than astronomically. 
And all now believe that the central position is occupied, not 
by the earth, but by the sun ; and that it is the lesser body that 
moves round the larger, — not the larger that moves round the 
lesser. What would have been the result, had Rome, backed 
by the Franciscan, succeeded in pledging the verity of Scrip- 
ture to a false astronomy? The astronomical facts of the case 
would have, of course, remained unchanged. The severe truth 
of geometry would have lent its demonstrative aid to establish 
their real character. All the higher minds would have become 
convinced for themselves, and the great bulk of the lower, at 
second hand, that the Scripture pledge had been given, not to 
scientific truth, but to scientific error; and the Bible, to the 
extent to which it stood committed, would be justly regarded as 
occupying no higher a level than the Shaster or Koran. Infi- 
delity never yet succeeded in placing Revelation in a position 
so essentially false as that in which it was placed by Rome, to 
the extent of Rome's ability, in the case of Galileo. 

Now, ultimately at least, as men have yielded to astronomy 
the right of decision in all astronomical questions, must they 
resign to geology the settlement of all geological ones. I do 
not merely speak of what ought, but of what assuredly must 
and will be. The successive geologic systems and formations, 
with all their organic contents, are as real existences as the sun 
itself; and it is quite as possible to demonstrate their true place 
and position, relative and absolute. And so long as certain 
fixed laws control and regulate human belief, certain inevitable 
29 



338 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

deductions must and will continue to be based on the facto 
which these systems and formations furnish. Geologists of 
the higher order differ among themselves, on certain minutiae 
of their science, to nearly as great an extent as the Episcopa- 
lian differs in matters ecclesiastical from the Presbyterian, or 
the Baptist or Independent from both. But their differences 
militate no more against the great conclusions in which they 
all agree, than the theological differences of the Protestant 
churches against the credibility of those leading truths oi 
Christianity on which all true churches are united. And one 
of these great conclusions respects the incalculably vast anti- 
quity of the earth on which we dwell. It seems scarce possible 
to over-estimate the force and weight of the evidence already 
expiscatcd on this point; and almost every new discovery adds 
to its cogency and amount. That sectional thickness of the 
earth's crust in which, mile beneath mile, the sedimentary 
strata are divided into many-colored and variously-composed 
systems and formations, and which abounds from top to bottom 
in organic remains, forms but the mere pages of the register. 
And it is rather the nature and order of the entries with which 
these pages are crowded, than the amazing greatness of their 
number, or the enormous extent of the space which they oc- 
cupy (rather more than five miles), — though both have, of 
course, their weight, — that compel belief in the remoteness of 
the period to which the record extends. Let me attempt eluci- 
dating the point by a simple illustration. 

In a well-kept English register, continuous from a distant 
antiquity to the present time, there are many marks demonstra- 
tive of the remoteness of the era to which it reaches, beside3 
the bulk and number of the volumes which compose it, and the 
multitude of the entries which they contain. In an earlier 
volume we find the ancient Saxon character united to that 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 339 

somewhat meagre yet not inexpressive language in which 
Alfred wrote and conversed. In a succeeding volume, the 
Saxon, both in word and letter, gives place to Norman French. 
The Norman French yields, in turn, in a yet succeeding one, 
to a massive black-letter character, and an antique combination 
of both tongues, which we term the genuine old English. And 
then, in after volumes, the old English gradually modernizes 
and improves, till we recognize it as no longer old : we see, too, 
the heavy black-letter succeeded by the lighter Italian hand, at 
first doggedly stiff and upright, but anon bent elegantly forward 
along the line. And in these various successions of character 
and language we recognize the marks of a genuine antiquiiy. 
Nor, in passing from these, — the mere externals of the regis- 
ter, — to the register itself, are the evidences less conclusive. 
In reading upwards, we find the existing families of the 
district preceded by families now extinct, and these, in turn, 
by families which had become extinct at earlier and still 
earlier periods. Names disappear, — titles alter, — the bound- 
aries of lands vary as the proprietors change, — smaller es- 
tates are now absorbed by larger, and now larger divide into 
smaller. There are traces not a few of customs long abrogated 
and manners become obsolete; and we see paroxysms of local 
revolution indicated by a marked grouping of events of corre- 
sponding character, that assume peculiar force and significancy 
when we collate the record with the general history of the 
kingdom. Could it be possible, I ask, to believe, regarding 
such a many-volumed register, — with all its various styles, 
characters, and languages, — its histories of the rise and fall 
of families, and its records of conquests, settlements, and revo- 
lutions, — that it had been all hastily written at a heal on a 
Saturday night, some three or four weeks ago, without any 
intention to deceive on the part of the writer, — nay, without 



340 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ar.y intention even of making a register at all ? The mere 
bulk and nui iber of the volumes would militate sadly against 
any such supposition ; but the peculiar character and order of 
their contents would militate against it more powerfully still. 

Now, the geologic register far excels any human record, in 
the number and significancy of the marks of a strictly analo- 
gous cast which demonstrate its vast antiquity. As we ascend 
higher, and yet higher, the characters of the document strangely 
alter. In the Tertiary ages we find an evident approximation 
to the existing style. An entire change takes place as we 
enter the Secondary period. A change equally marked char- 
acterizes the Palaeozoic eras. Up till the commencement of 
the Cretaceous system, two great orders of fish, — the Ctenoid 
and Cycloid, — fish furnished with horny scales and bony skel- 
etons, — comprise, as they now do, the great bulk of the finny 
inhabitants of the waters. But immediately beyond the Creta- 
ceous group these two orders wholly disappear, and the Ga- 
noid and Placoid orders — fish that wear an armature of bono 
outside, and whose skeletons are chiefly cartilaginous — take 
their places. Up till the period of the Magnesian Limestone, 
the homocercal or two-lobed type of fish-tail greatly preponder- 
ates, as at the present time ; but in all the older formations, — 
those of the immensely extended Palaeozoic period, — not a 
single tail of this comparatively modern type is to be found, 
and the heterocercal or one-sided tail obtains exclusively. 
Down till the deposition of the Chalk has taken place, all the 
true woods are coniferas of the Pine or Araucarian families. 
After the Chalk has been deposited, hard-wood trees, of the 
dicotyledonous order, are largely introduced. Down till the 
times of the Magnesian Limestone, plants of an inferior order 
— ferns, stigmaria, club-mosses, and calamites — attain to a 
size so gigantic that they rival the true denizens of the forest ' 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 341 

whereas with the dawn of the Secondary period we find the 
immaturities of the vegetable kingdom reduced to a bulk and 
size that consort better with the palpable inferiority of their 
rank in creation. And not only are the styles and characters 
of the several periods of the geologic register thus various, but, 
as in the English register of my illustration, the record of the 
rise and fall of septs and families is singularly distinct. The 
dynasties of the crustacean, the fish, the reptile, and the mam- 
miferous quadruped, succeed each other in an order as definite 
as the four great empires in the " Ancient History " of Rollin. 
Nor are the periods when single families arose and sank less 
carefully noted. The trilobite family came into existence with 
the first beginnings of the Palaeozoic division, and ceased at its 
close. The belemnite family began and became extinct with 
the Secondary formations. The ammonite and gryphite, in all 
their many species, did not outlive the deposition of the Chalk. 
There is one definite period, — the close of the Palceozoic era, 
— at which the Brachiopoda, singularly numerous throughout 
many previous formations, and consisting of many great fami- 
lies, suddenly, with the exception of a single genus, drop off 
and disappear. There is another definite period, — the close 
of the Secondary era, — at which the Cephalopoda, with nearly 
as few exceptions, disappear as suddenly. At this latter period, 
too, the Enaliosaurians, so long the monster tyrants of the 
ocean, cease forever, and the Cetacea take their places : the 
be-paddled reptiles go off the stage, and the be-paddled mam 
malia come on. But perhaps the most striking series of facts 
of this nature in the whole range of geological literature, is 
that embodied in the table affixed by Agassiz to his great work 
on fossil fish. 

This singularly interesting document — which, like the 
annual balance-sheet of a great mercantile house or banking 
29* 



342 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

company, that comprises in its comparatively few lines of 
figures the result of every arithmetical calculation made by the 
firm during the twelvemonth — condenses, in a single page, 
the results of the naturalist's observations in his own peculiar 
department for many years. It marks at what periods the 
great families of the extinct fishes began, and when they 
ceased, and at what periods those great families arose which 
continue to exist in the present state of things. The facts are 
exceedingly curious. Some of the families are, we find, of 
comparatively brief standing, and occupy but small space in 
the record, — others sweep across well-nigh the whole geolog- 
ical scale. Some come into existence with the beginning of 
a system, and cease at its close, — others continue to exist 
throughout almost all the systems together. The salmon and 
herring families, though the species were different, lived in the 
ages of the Chalk, and ever since, throughout the periods of 
the Tertiary; while the cod and haddock family pertains, on 
the contrary, to but the existing scene of things. The Cepha- 
laspides — that family to which the Pterichthys and Coccosici/s 
belong — were restricted to a single system, the Old Red 
Sandstone; nor had its contemporaries the Dipterians — that 
family to which the Osteolepis and Diplupterus belong — a 
longer term; whereas the Caelacanthes, — the family of the 
HoloptycJiius, Glyptolepis, and Aster ole pis, — while it began as 
early, passed down to the times of the Chalk, — and the Ces- 
sations — even a more ancient family still — continue to have 
their living representatives. It is hold by the Dean of York 
that the fact of the Noachian Deluge may be made satisfacto- 
rily to account for all the geologic phenomena. Alas! No 
cataclysm, however great or general, could have produced 
diversities of style, each restricted to a determinate period, and 
wh'ch become more broadly apparent the more carefully we 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 343 

collate the geologic register as it exists in one country with 
the same register as it exists in another. No cataclysm could 
have arranged an infinitude of entries in exact chronological 
order, or assigned to the tribes and families which it destroyed 
and interred distinct consecutive periods and formations. It is 
but common sense to hold that the Deluge could not have pro- 
duced an ancient church-yard, — such as the Grayfriars of 
Edinburgh, — with its series of tombstones in all their suc- 
cessive styles, — Gothic, Elizabethan, Roman, and Grecian, — 
complete for many centuries. It could not have been the 
author of the old English register of my illustration. Geolo- 
gists affirm regarding the Flood, merely to the effect that it 
could not have written Hume's History of England, nor even 
composed and set into type Mr. Burke's British Peerage. 

Such are a few of the difficulties with which the anti-geolo- 
gist has to contend. That leading fact of the Deluge, — the 
ark, — taken in connection with the leading geologic fact that 
the organic remains of the various systems, from the Lower 
Silurian to the Chalk inclusive, are the remains of extinct races 
and tribes, forms a difficulty of another kind. The fact of the 
ark satisfactorily shows that man in his present state has been 
contemporary with but one creation. The preservation by 
sevens and by pairs of the identical races amid which he first 
started into existence superseded the necessity of a creation 
after the Flood ; and so it is the same tribes of animals, wild 
and domestic, which share with him in his p.ace of habitation 
now, that surrounded him in Paradise. But the Palaeozoic, 
Secondary, and older Tertiary animals, are of races and tribes 
altogether diverse. We find among them not even a single 
species which sheltered in the ark. The races contemporary 
with man were preserved to bear him company in his pilgrim- 
age, and o minister to his necessities ; but those strange races, 



344 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

buried, in many instances, whole miles beneath the surface, and 
never seen save imbedded in rock and transformed into stone, 
could not have been his contemporaries. They belong, as their 
place and appearance demonstrate, to periods long anterior. 
Nor can it be rationally held, that of those anterior periods 
revelation should have given us any history. They lie palpa- 
bly beyond the scope of the sacred record. On what principle, 
seeing it is silent on the contemporary creations of Mars, Ve- 
nus, and Jupiter, ought it to have spoken on the consecutive 
creations of the Silurian, Carboniferous, and Oolitic periods ? 
Why should it promulgate the truths of Geology, seeing that 
those of Astronomy it has withheld ? Man everywhere has 
entertained the expectation of a book, Heaven-inspired, that 
should teach him what God is, and what God demands of him. 
The sacred books of all the false religions, from those of 
Zoroaster and the Brahmins to those of Mahomet and the 
Mormons, are just so many evidences that the expectation 
exists. And the Bible is its fulfilment. But man has enter- 
tained no such expectation of a revelation from God of the 
truths of science ; nor is it according to the economy of Provi- 
dence, — the economy manifested in the slow and gradual 
development of the species, — that any such expectation should 
be realized. The "Principia" of Newton is an uninspired 
volume ; and only the natural faculties were engaged in the 
discovery of James Watt. 

But it is not urged, it may be said, that the Scriptures reveal 
geologic truth as such ; it is merely urged that geologists must 
not traverse Scripture statements respecting the age of the 
earth, as revealed for purely religious purposes by God to 
Moses. But did God reveal the earth's age to Moses ? Not 
directly, surely, or else men equally sound in the faith would 
not be found lengthening or shortening the brief period which 



ENGLAND A.ND ITS PEOPLE. 345 

intervenes between Adan and Abraham, just as they adopt 
tne Hebrew or Septuagint chronology, by nearly a thousand 
years. Here, however, it may be said that we are in doubt 
regarding the real chronology, not because God has not indi- 
rectly revealed it, but because man, in either the Hebrew or 
Samaritan record, has vitiated the revelation. Most true : 
still, however, the doubt is doubt. But did God reveal the 
earth's age, either directly or otherwise ? Let us examine the 
narrative. "In the beginning God created the heaven and 
the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and 
darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of 
God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let 
there be light, and there was light." Now, let it be admitted, 
for the argument's sake, that the earth existed in the dark and 
void state described here only six days, of twenty-four hours 
each, before the creation of man ; and that the going forth of 
the Spirit and the breaking out of the light, on this occasion, 
were events immediately introductory to the creation to which 
we ourselves belong. And what then ? It is evident, from the 
continuity of the narrative in the passage, say the anti-geolo- 
gists, that there could have been no creations on this earth 
prior to the present one. Nay, not so : for aught that appears 
in the narrative, there might have been many. Between the 
creation of the matter of which the earth is composed, as enun- 
ciated in the first verse, and the earth's void and chaotic state, 
as described in the second, a thousand creations might have 
intervened. As may be demonstrated from even the writings 
of Moses himself, the continuity of a narrative furnishes no 
evidence whatever that the facts which it records were con- 
tinuous. 

Take, Ibr instance, the following passage. " There went 
out a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter 



346 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

of Levi. A.nd the woman conceived and bare a son ; and 
vdien she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him 
thiee moni hs. And when she could not longer hide him, she 
tooK for hi n an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and 
with pitch, and put the child therein ; and she laid it in the 
flags by the river's brink." * The narrative here is quite as 
continuous as in the first three verses of Genesis. In the order 
of the relation, the marriage of the parents is as directly fol- 
lowed in the one case by the birth of a son, as the creation of 
matter is followed in the other by the first beginnings of the 
existing state of things. The reader has as slight grounds to 
infer, in the one case, that between the marriage of the parents 
and the birth of the child the births of several other children 
of the family had taken place, as to infer, in the other, that 
between the creation of matter and the subsisting creation 
there had taken place several other creations. And if the con- 
tinuity of the narrative would not justify the inference in the 
one case, just as little can it justify it in the other. We know, 
however, from succeeding portions of Scripture, that the father 
and mother of this child had several other children born to 
them in the period that intervened between their marriage and 
his birth. They had a son named Aaron, who had been born 
at least two years previous ; and a daughter, Miriam, who was 
old enough at the time to keep sedulous watch over the little 
ark of bulrushes, and to suggest to Pharaoh's daughter that it 
might be well for her to go and call one of the Hebrew women 

* I owe this passage, in its bearing on the opening narrative in Genesis, 
to the Kev. Alexander Stewart, of Cromarty, — for fifteen years my parish 
minister, and one of decidedly the most original-minded men and most 
accomplished theologians his country has ever produced. And he, I may 
add, like all careful students of Scripture of the higher calibre, can see 
no irreconcilable d fference between Bible truth and the great facts of 
the geologist. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 347 

to be nurse to the child. It was essential, in the course of 
Scripture narrative, that we should be introduced to personages 
so famous as Aaron and Miriam, and who were destined to 
enact parts so important in the history of the Church ; and so 
we have been introduced to them. And had it been as neces- 
sary for the pu -poses of revelation that reference should have 
been made to tne intervening creations in the one case, as to 
the intervening births in the other, we would doubtless have 
hea."d of them too. But, as has been already said, it was not 
so necessary; it was not necessary at all. The ferns and 
lepiaodendra of the Coal Measures are as little connected with 
the truths which influence our spiritual state, as the vegetable 
productions of Mercury or of Pallas ; the birds and reptiles of 
the Oolite, as the unknown animals that inhabit the plains or 
disport in the rivers of Saturn or Uranus. And so revelation 
is as silent on the geological phenomena as on the contempo- 
rary creations, — on the periods and order of systems and 
formations, as on the relative positions of the earth and sun, or 
the places and magnitudes of the planets. 

Bat organic remains may, it is urged, have been created 
such ; and the special miracle through which the gourd of 
Jonah, though it must have seemed months old, sprung up in a 
single night, and the general miracle through which the trees 
of Paradise must have appeared, even on the first evening of 
their creation, half a century old, have been adduced to show 
that the globe, notwithstanding its marks of extreme antiquity, 
may have been produced with all these marks stamped upon it, 
as if in the mint. " The very day when the ocean dashed its 
first waves on the shore," says Chateaubriand, "it bathed, let 
us not doubt, rocks already worn by the breakers, and beaches 
strewn with the wrecks of shells." — " For aught that appears 
in the bowels of the earth," said the "Record" newspaper, some 



348 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

two years ago, in adopting this peculiar view, as expressed by 
a worthy Presbyterian minister, " the world might have been 
called into existence yesterday." Let US just try whether, as 
creatures to whom God has given reason, and who cannot 
acquire facts without drawing inferences, we can believe the 
assertion; and ascertain how much this curious principle of 
explaining geologic fact actually involves. 

" The earth, for anything that appears to the contrary, may 
have been made yesterday!" We stand in the middle of an 
ancient burying-ground in a northern district. The monu- 
ments of the dead, lichened and gray, rise thick around us ; 
and there are fragments of mouldering bones lying scattered 
amid the loose dust that rests under them, in dark recesses 
impervious to the rain and the sunshine. We dig into the soil 
below : here is a human skull, and there numerous other well- 
known bones of the human skeleton, — vertebra;, ribs, arm and 
leg bones, with the bones of the breast and pelvis. Still, as we 
dig, the bony mass accumulates ; — we disinter portions, not of 
one, but of many skeletons, some comparatively fresh, some in 
a state of great decay; and with the bones there mingle frag- 
ments of coffins, with the wasted tinsel-mounting in some 
instances still attached, and the rusted nails still sticking in 
the joints. We continue to dig, and, at a depth to which the 
sexton almost never penetrates, find a stratum of pure sea- 
sand, and then a stratum of the sea-shells common on the 
neighboring coast, — in especial, oyster, muscle, and cockle 
shells. It may be mentioned, in the passing, that the church- 
yard to which I refer, though at some little distance from the 
sea, is situated on one of the raised beaches of the north of 
Scotland; and hence the shells. We dig a little further, and 
reach a thick bed of sandstone, which we penetrate, and beneath 
which we find a bed of impure lime, richly charged with the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 349 

remains of fish of Btrangely antique forms. "The earth, for 
anything that appears to the contrary, might have been made 
yesterday ! " J)o appearances such as these warrant the infer- 
ence? Do these human skeletons, in all their various stages 
of decay, appear as if they had been made yesterday? Was 
that bit of coffin, with the soiled tinsel on the one side, and the 
corroded nail sticking out of the other, made yesterday ? Was 

yonder skull, instead of having ever formed part of a human 
head, created yesterday, exactly the repulsive-looking sort of 
thing- we see it? Indisputably not. Such is the nature of the 
human mind, — such the laws that regulate and control human 
belief, — that in the very existence of that churchyard we do 
and must recognize positive proof that the world was not made 
yesterday. 

Uut can we stop in our process of inference at the moulder- 
ing remains of the churchyard? Can we hold that the skull 
was not created a mere skull, and yet hold that the oyster, 
muscle, and cockle shells beneath are not the remains of mol- 
luscous animals, but tilings originally created in exactly their 
present stale, as empty shells? The supposition is altogether 
absurd. Such is the constitution of our minds, that we must 
as certainly hold yonder oyster-shel] to have once formed part 
of a mollusc, as we hold yonder skull to have once formed part 
of a man. And if we cannot stop at the skeleton, how stop at 
the shells? Why not pass on to the fish? The evidence of 
design is quite as irresistible in them as in the human or the 
molluscous remains above. We can still see the scales which 
covered them occupying their proper places, with all their 

nicely-designed bars, hooks, and nails of attachment: the litis 
which propelled them through the water, will the multitudin- 
ous pseudo-joints, formed to impart to the rays the proper elas- 
ticity, lie widely spread on the stone; the sharp-pointed teeth, 

no 



350 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

constructed like those of fish generally, rather for the purpose 
of holding fast slippery substances than of mastication, stih 
bristle in their jaws ; nay, the very plates, spines, and scales 
of the fish on which they had fed, still lie undigested in their 
abdomens. We cannot stop short at the shells : if the human 
skull was not created a mere skull, nor the shell a mere dead 
shell, then the fossil fish could not have been created a mere 
fossil. There is no broken link in the chain at which to take 
our stand ; and yet, having once recognized the fishes as such. 
— having recognized them as the remains of animals, and not 
as stones that exist in their original state, — we stand com- 
mitted to all the organisms of the geological scale. 

But we limit the Divine power, it may be said : could not 
the Omnipotent First Cause have created all the fossils of the 
earth, vegetable and animal, in their fossil state ? Yes, cer- 
tainly ; the act of their creation, regarded simply as an act of 
power, does not and cannot transcend his infinite ability. He 
could have created all the burying-grounds of the earth, with 
all their broken and wasted contents, brute and human. He 
could have created all the mummies of Mexico and of Egypt 
as such, and all the skeletons of the catacombs of Paris. It 
would manifest, however, but little reverence for his character 
to compliment his infinite power at the expense of his infinite 
wisdom. It would be doing no honor to his name to regard 
him as a creator of dead skeletons, mummies, and church- 
yards. Nay, we could not recognize him as such, without 
giving to the winds all those principles of common reason 
which in his goodness he has imparted to us for our guidance 
in the ordinary affairs of life. In this, as in that higher sense 
adduced by our Saviour, " God is not the God of the dead, but 
of the living." In the celebrated case of Eugene Aram, the 
skeleton of his victim, the murdered Clark, was found in a 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 351 

cave ; but how, asked the criminal, in his singularly ingenious 
and eloquent defence, could that skeleton be known to be 
Clark's ? The cave, he argued, had once been a hermitage ; 
and in times past hermitages had been places not only of relig- 
ious retirement, but of burial also. " And it has scarce or ever 
been heard of," he continued, " but that every cell now known 
contains or contained those relics of humanity, — some muti- 
lated, some entire. Give me leave to remind the Court that 
here sat solitary sanctity, and here the hermit and the ancho- 
rite hoped that repose for their bones when dead, they here 
enjoyed when living. Every place conceals such remains. In 
fields, on hills, on highway sides, on wastes, on commons, lie 
frequent and unsuspected bones. But must some of the living 
be made answerable for all the bones that earth has concealed 
and chance exposed?" Such were the reasonings, on this 
count, of Eugene Aram ; and it behooved the jury that sat upon 
him in judgment to bestow upon them their careful consider- 
ation. But how very different might not his line of argument 
have been, had the conclusions of the anti-geologist squared 
with the principles of human belief ! If the fossil exuvioe of a 
fish, or the fossil skeleton of a reptile, may have never belonged 
to either a reptile or a fish, then the skeleton of a man may 
have never belonged to a man. No more could be argued, 
Aram might have said, from the finding of a human skeleton 
in the floor of a cave, than from the finding of a pebble or a 
piece of rock in the floor of a cave. So far from being justified 
in inferring from it that a murder had been perpetrated, a jury 
could not have so much as inferred from it that a human 
creature had existed. 

Is the anti-geologist, I would fain ask, prepared to gi^e up 
the great argument founded on design, as asserted and illus- 
trated by oil the master-minds who have written on the 



352 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

Evidences ? Is he resolved, in the vain hope of bearing down 
the geologist, to make a full surrender to the infidel ? Let us 
mark how Paley's well-known illustration of the watch found 
on the moor would apply in this controversy. From the design 
exhibited in the construction of the watch, the existence of a 
designer is inferred ; whereas, from a stone found on the same 
moor, in which no such marks of design are apparent, the 
Archdeacon urges that no such inference regarding the exist- 
ence of a designer could be drawn. But what would be thought 
of the man who could assert that the watch, with all its seem- 
ing design, was not a watch, but a stone ; and that, notwith- 
standing its spring, its wheels, and its index, it had never been 
intended to measure time ? What could be said of a sturdily 
avowed belief in a design not designed, and not the work of a 
designer, — in a watch furnished with all the parts of a watch, 
that is, notwithstanding, a mere stone, and occupies just its 
proper place when lying among the other stones of a moor ? 
What could be said of such a belief, paraded not simply as a 
belief, but actually as of the nature of reasoning, and fitted to 
bear weight in controversy ? And yet, such is the position of 
the anti-geologist, who sees in the earth, with all its fossils, no 
evidence that it might not *have been created yesterday. For 
obvious it is, that in whatever has been designed, fitness of 
parts bears reference to the purposed object which the design 
subserves ; and that if there be no purposed object, there can 
exist no fitness of parts in relation to it, and, in reality, no 
Jesign. The analogy drawn in the case from the miracle of 
creation is no analogy at all. It is not contrary to the laws 
which control human belief, that the first races of every suc- 
ceeding creation should have been called into existence in a 
state of full development ; nay, it is in palpable and harmonious 
accordance with these laws. It is necessary that the anima 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 353 

which had no parents to care or provide for it should come into 
existence in a state of maturity sufficient to enable it to care 
and provide for itself ; it is equally necessary that the contem- 
porary vegetable, its food, should be created in a condition that 
fitted it for being food. Had the first man and first woman 
been created mere infants, they would, humanly speaking, have 
shared the fate of the " babes in the wood." Had the produc- 
tions of the vegetable kingdom been created in an analogous 
state of immaturity, " the horse," to borrow from an old proverb, 
" would have died when the grass was growing." But it is 
contrary to the laws which control human belief, that the all- 
wise Creator should be a maker of churchyards full of the 
broken debris of carcasses, — of skeletons never purposed to com- 
pose the framework of animals, — of watches never intended 
to do aught than perform the part of stones.* 

* In the pages of no writer is the argument drawn from the miracle of 
creation — if argument it may be termed — at once so ingeniously as- 
serted and so exquisitely adorned, as in the pages of Chateaubriand. The 
passage is comparatively little known in this country, and so I quote it 
entire from the translation of a friend. 

" We approach the last objection concerning the modern origin of the 
globe. ' The earth,' it is said, ' is an old nurse, whose decrepitude every- 
thing announces. Examine its fossils, its marbles, its granites, and you 
will decipher its innumerable years, marked by circle, by stratum, or by 
branch, like those of the serpent by his rattles, the horse by his teeth, or 
the stag by his horns.' 

"This difficulty has been a hundred times solved by this answer, — 
* God should have created, and without question has created, the world, 
with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which we now see.' 

" Indeed, it is probable that the Author of nature at first planted old 
forests and young shoots, — that animals were produced, some full of clays, 
others adorned with all the graces of infancy. Oaks, as they pierced the 
fruitful soil, would bear at once the forsaken nest of the crow and the 
young posterity of the dore; the caterpillar was chrysalis and butterfly; 
the insect, fed on the herb, suspended its golden egg amid the forests, or 
trembled in the wavy air; the bee which had lived but a single morning 
30* 



354 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

I confess it grieves me more than if Puseyism were the 
offender, to see a paper such as the London "Record," — the 
organ of no inconsiderable section of the Evangelical Episco- 

reckonec' its ambrosia by generations of flowers. We must believe that 
the sheep was not without its young, the fawn without its little ones, — 
that the thickets hid nightingales, astonished with their own first music, 
in warming the fleeting hopes of their first loves. If the world had not 
been at once young and old, the grand, the serious, the moral, would 
disappear from nature ; for these sentiments belong essentially to the 
antique. Every scene would have lost its wonders. The ruined rock 
could not have hung over the abyss ; the woods, despoiled of every chance 
appearance, would not have displayed that touching disorder of trees 
bending over their roots, and of trunks leaning over the courses of the 
rivers. Inspired thoughts, venerable sounds, magic voices, the sacred 
gloom of forests, would vanish with the vaults which served them for 
retreats ; and the solitudes of heaven and earth would remain naked and 
disenchanted, in losing those columns of oak which unite them. The very 
day when the ocean dashed its first waves on the shores, it bathed — let 
us not doubt — rocks already worn by the breakers, beaches strewn 
with the wrecks of shells, and headlands which sustained against the 
assaults of the waters the crumbling shores of earth. Without this inher- 
ent old age, there would have been neither pomp nor majesty in the work 
of the Eternal ; and, what could not possibly be, nature in its innocence 
would have been less beautiful than it is to-day amid its corruption. An 
insipid infancy of plants, animals, and elements, would have crowned a 
world without poetry. But God was not so tasteless a designer of the 
bowers of Eden as infidels pretend. The man king was himself born 
thirty years old, in order to accord in his majesty with the ancient grand- 
eur of his new kingdom ; and his companion reckoned sixteen springs 
which she had not lived, that she might harmonize with flowers, birds, 
innocence, love, and all the youthful part of the creation." 

This is unquestionably fine writing, and it contains a considerable 
amount of general truth. But not a particle of the true does it contain in 
connection Avith the one point which the writer sets himself to establish. 
There exists, as has been shown, a reason, palpable in the nature of 
things, why creation, in even its earliest dawn, should not have exhibited 
an insipid infancy of plants and animals ; the animals, otherwise, could 
not have survived, and thus the great end of creation would have been 
lefeated. But though there exists an obvious reason for the creation of 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 355 

nacy of England, — committing- itse.f to the anti-geologists on 
this question. At the meeting of the British Association which 

the full-grown and the mature, there exists no reason whatever for the 
creation of the ruined and the broken. It is a very indifferent argument 
to allege that the poetic sentiment demanded the production of fractured 
shells on the shores, or of deserted crows' nests in the trees. If senti- 
ment demanded the creation of broken shells that had never belonged to 
molluscous animals, how much more imperatively must it have demanded 
the creation of broken human skeletons that had never belonged to men ! 
or, if it rendered necessary the creation of deserted crows' nests, how 
much more urgent the necessity for the creation of deserted palaces and 
temples, sublime in their solitude, or of desolate cities partially buried in 
the sands of the desert ! There is a vast deal more of poetry in the ancient 
sepulchres of Thebes and of Luxor, with their silent millions of the em 
balmed dead, than in the comminuted shells of sea-beaches ; and in Pal- 
myra and the pyramids, than in deserted crows' nests. Nor would the 
creation of the one class of productions be in any degree less probable, or 
less according to the principles of human belief, than the other. And 
mark the inevitable effects on human conduct ! The man who honestly 
held with Chateaubriand in this passage, and was consistent in following 
out to their legitimate consequences the tenets which it embodies, could 
not sit as a juryman in either a coroner's inquest or a trial for murder, 
conducted on circumstantial evidence. If he held that an old crow's nest 
might have been called into existence as such, how could he avoid holding 
that an ancient human dAvelling might not have been called into existence 
as such ? If he held that a broken patella or whelk-shell might have 
been created a broken shell, how could he avoid holding that a human 
skull, fractured like that of the murdered Clark, might not have been 
created a broken skull ? To him Paley's watch, picked up on a moor, 
could not appear as other than merely a curious stone, charged with no 
evidence, in the peculiarity of its construction, that it had been intended 
to measure time. The entire passage is eminently characteristic of that 
magnificent work of imagination, "The Genius of Christianity," in 
which Chateaubriand sets himself to reconvert to Romanism the infidelity 
of France. He ever attempts dealing by the reasoning faculty in his 
countrymen, as the Philistines of old dealt by the Jewish champion : 
instead of meeting it in the open field, and with the legitimate weapons, 
he sends forth the exquisitely beautiful Delilah of his fancy to cajole and 
set it asleep, and then bind it as with green withes. 



356 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

held at York in 1844, the puerilities of Dean Cockbum were 
happily met with and exposed by the Rev. Mr. Sedgwick ; and 
it was on that occasion that the " Record," after pronouncing 
it no slight satire on this accomplished man of science, that 
one of the members present should have eulogized his " bold- 
ness as a clergyman," adopted the assertion, — can it be called 
belief? — that for aught which appears to the contrary, "the 
world might have been made yesterday." Attempts to support 
the true in religion by the untrue in science, manifest, I am 
afraid, exceedingly little wisdom. False witnesses, when en- 
gaged in just causes, serve but to injure them ; and certainly 
neither by anti-geologists nor at the Old Bailey should " kissing 
the book " be made a preliminary to supporting the untrue. I 
do not find that the truly great theologians of the day manifest 
any uneasy jealousy of geological discovery. Geologists, ex- 
patiating in their proper province, have found nothing antago- 
nistic in the massive intellect and iron logic of Dr. Cunning- 
ham, of Edinburgh, nor in the quick comprehensiveness and 
elastic vigor of Dr. Candlish. Chalmers has already given his 
deliverance on this science, — need it be said after what man- 
ner ? — and in a recent number of the " North British Review " 
may be found the decision regarding it of a kindred spirit, the 
author of the " Natural History of Enthusiasm." " The 
reader," says this distinguished man, in adverting to certain 
influential causes that in the present day widely affect theologic 
opinion and the devotional feeling, " will know that we here 
refer to that indirect modification of religious notions and sen- 
timents, that results insensibly from the spread and consolida- 
tion of the modern sister sciences, Astronomy and Geology, 
which, immeasurably enlarging, as they do, our conceptions of 
the universe in its two elements of space and time, expel a 
congeries of narrow' errors, heretofore regarded as unquostiona- 



engiaNd and its ieople. 357 

ble truths, and open before us at or.ce a Chart and a History 
of the Dominions of Infinite Power and Wisdom. We shall 
hasten to exclude the supposition," he continues, " that, in thus 
mentioning the relation of the modern sciences to Christianity 
we are thinking of anything so small and incidental as are the 
alleged discrepancies between the terms of Biblical history, in 
certain instances, and the positive evidence of science. All 
such discordances, whether real or apparent, will find the 
proper means of adjustment readily and finally in due time. 
We have no anxieties on the subject. Men ' easily shaken in 
mind' will rid themselves of the atoms of faith which perhaps 
they once possessed, by the means of ' difficulties ' such as 
these. Bat it is not from causes so superficial that serious 
danger to the faith of a people is to be apprehended." The 
passages which follow this very significant one are eminently 
beautiful and instructive ; but enough is here given to indicate 
the judgment of the writer on the point at issue. 

There is, I doubt not, a day coming, when writers on the 
evidences of the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed, will 
be content to borrow largely from the facts of the geologist. 
Who among living men may anticipate the thinking of future 
generations, or indicate in what direction new avenues into the 
regions of thought shall yet be opened up by the key of unborn 
genius ? The births of the human intellect, like those which 
take place in the human family, await their predestined time. 
There are, however, two distinct theologic vistas on the geo- 
logic field, that seem to open up of themselves, infidelity has 
toiled hard to obviate the necessity of a First Great Cause, by 
the fiction of an Infinite Series ; and Metaphysic Theology has 
labored hard, in turn, to prove the fiction untenable and absurd. 
But metaphysicians, though specially assisted in the work by 
such men as Bentley and Rooert Hall, have not been success 



358 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ful. They nave, indeed, shown that an infuite seiies is, from 
many points of view, wholly inconceivable, but they have not 
shown that it is impossible; and its inconceivability merely 
attaches to it in its character as an infinity contemplated entire. 
Exactly the same degree of inconceivability attaches to " the 
years of the Eternal," if we attempt comprehending the eter- 
nity of Deity otherwise than in the progressive mode which 
Locke so surely demonstrates to be the only possible one : we 
can but take our stand at some definite period, and realize the 
possibility of measuring backwards, along the course of His 
existence for ever and ever, and have at every succeeding stage 
an undiminished infinitude of work before us. Metaphysic 
Theology furnishes no real argument against the "Infinite 
Series " of the atheist. But Geology supplies the wanting 
link, and laughs at the idle fiction of a race of men without 
beginning. Infinite series of human creatures ! Why, man is 
but of yesterday. The fish enjoyed life during many crea- 
tions, — the bird and reptile during not a few, — the marsupial 
quadruped ever since the times of the Oolite, — the sagacious 
elephant in at least the latter ages of the Tertiary. But man 
belongs to the present creation, and to it exclusively. He came 
into being late on the Saturday evening. He has come, as the 
great moral instincts of his nature so surely demonstrate, to 
prepare for the sacred to-morrow. In the chariot of God's prov- 
idence, as seen by the prophet in vision, there are wheels within 
wheels, — a complex duality of type and symbol : and there 
may possibly exist a similar complexity of arrangement, — a 
similar duality of typical plan, — in the Divine institution of 
the Sabbath. Its place, as the seventh day, may bear reference, 
not only to that special subordinate week in which the existing 
scene of things was called into being, but also to that great 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 359 

geologic week, within which is comprised the tnt re scheme of 
creation. 

Tne second theological vista into the geol gic field opens up 
a still more striking prospect. There is a sad oppressiveness 
in that sense of human littleness which tne great truths of 
astronomy have so direct a tendency to inspire. Man feels 
himself lost amid the sublime magnitudes of creation, — a mere 
atom in the midst of infinity; and trembles lest the scheme ot 
revelation should be found too large a manifestation of the 
Divine care for so tiny an ephemera. Now, I am much mis- 
taken if the truths of Geology have not a direct tendency to 
restore him to his true place. When engaged some time since 
in perusing one of the sublimest philosophic poems of modern 
times, — the " Astronomical Discourses " of Dr. Chalmers, — 
tnere occurred to me a new argument that might be employed 
against the infidel objection which the work was expressly 
written to remove. The infidel points to the planets ; and, 
reasoning from an analogy which, on other than geologic data, 
the Christian cannot challenge, asks whether it be not more 
than probable that each of these is, like our own earth, not only 
a scene of creation, but also a home of rational, accountable 
creatures. And then follows the objection, as fully stated by 
Dr. Chalmers : — " Does not the largeness of that field which 
astronomy lays open to the view of modern science throw a 
suspicion over the truth of the Gospel history ? and how shall 
we reconcile the greatness of that wonderful movement which 
was made in heaven for the redemption of fallen man, with the 
comparative meanness and obscurity of our species ? Geology, 
when the doctor wrote, was in a state cf comparative infancy. 
It has since been largely developed, and we have been intro- 
duced, in consequence, to the knowledge of some five or six 
different creations, of which this globe was the successive scene 



360 FIRST IMPRESSIOxXS OF 

ere the present creation was called into being. At the time the 
" Astronomical Discourses " were published, the infidel coulc^ 
base his analogy on his knowledge of but one creation, — that 
to which we ourselves belong ; whereas we can now base our 
analogy on the knowledge of at least six creations, the vari- 
ous productions of which we can handle, examine, and com- 
pare. And how, it may be asked, does this immense extent 
of basis affect the objection with which Dr. Chalmers has grap- 
pled so vigorously ? It annihilates it completely. You argue 
— may not the geologist say to the infidel — that yonder planet, 
because apparently a scene of creation like our own, is also a 
home of accountable creatures like ourselves ? But the ex- 
tended analogy furnished by geologic science is full against 
you. Exactly so might it have been argued regarding oui 
own earth during the early creation represented by the Lower 
Silurian system, and yet the master-existence of that extended 
period was a crustacean. Exactly so might it have been argued 
regarding the earth during the term of the creation represented 
by the Old Red Sandstone, and yet the master-existence of 
that not less extended period was a fish. During the creation 
represented by the Carboniferous period, with all its rank vege- 
tation and green reflected light, the master-existence was a 
fish still. During the creation of the Oolite, the master-exist- 
ence was a reptile, a bird, or a marsupial animal. During 
the creation of the Cretaceous period, there was no further 
advance. During the creation of the Tertiary formations, the 
master-existence was a mammiferous quadruped. It w 7 as not 
until the creation to which we ourselves belong was called into 
existence, that a rational being, born to anticipate a hereafter, 
was ushered upon the scene. Suppositions such as yours 
would have been false in at least five out of six instances ; and 
if in five out of six consecutive creations there existed no account- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 361 

fcble agent, what shadow of reason can there be for holding 
that a different arrangement obtains in five out of six contem- 
porary creations ? Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, 
and Uranus, may have all their plants and animals : and yet 
they may be as devoid of rational, accountable creatures, as were 
the creations of the Silurian, Old Red Sandstone, Carbonifer- 
ous, Oolitic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary periods. They may be 
merely some of the " many mansions " prepared in the " Father's 
house " for the immortal creature of kingly destiny, made in 
the Father's own image, to whom this little world forms but 
the cradle and the nursery. 

But the effect of this extended geologic basis may be neu- 
tralized, — the infidel may urge, — by extending it yet a little 
further. Why, he may ask, since we draw our analogies regard- 
ing what obtains in the other planets from what obtains in our 
own, — why not conclude that each one of them has also had 
its geologic eras and revolutions, — its Silurian, Old Red Sand- 
stone, Carboniferous, Oolitic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary periods ; 
and that now, contemporary with the creation of which man 
constitutes the master-existence, they have all their fully 
matured creations headed by rationality ? Why not carry the 
analogy thus far ? Simply, it may be unhesitatingly urged in 
reply, because to carry it so far would be to carry it beyond 
the legitimate bounds of analogy ; and because analogy pursued 
but a single step beyond the limits of its proper province, is 
sure always to land the pursuer in error. Analogy is not 
identity. It is safe when it deals with generals ; very unsafe 
when it grapples with particulars. 

Analogy, I repeat, is not identity. Let me attempt illus- 
trating the fact in its bearing on this question. We find 
reason to conclude, as Isaac Taylor well expresses it, that " the 
planetary stuff is all one and the same." And we know 
31 



362 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

to a certainty, that human nature, wherever it exists in the 
present state of things, "is all one and the same" also. But 
when reasoning analogically regarding either, we can but cal- 
culate on generals, not particulars. Man being all over the 
world a constructive, house-making animal, and, withal, fond 
of ornament, one would be quite safe in arguing analogically 
from an acquaintance with Europe alone, that wherever there 
is a civilized nation, architecture must exist as an art. But 
analogy is not identity ; and he would be egregiously in error 
who would conclude that nations, civilized or semi-civilized, 
such as the Chinese, Hindoos, or ancient Mexicans, possess 
not only an ornate architecture, but an architecture divided 
into two great schools ; and that the one school has its Doric, 
Ionic, and Corinthian orders, and the other school its Saxon, 
Norman, and Florid styles. In like manner, man's nature 
being everywhere the same, it may be safely inferred that man 
will everywhere be an admirer of female beauty. But analogy 
is not identity ; and it would be a sad mistake to argue, just 
as one chanced to be resident in Africa or England, that man 
everywhere admired black skins and flat noses, or a fair com- 
plexion and features approximating to the Grecian type. And 
instances of a resembling character may be multiplied without 
end. Analogy, so sagacious a guide in its own legitimate 
field, is utterly blind and senseless in the piecincts that lie 
beyond it : it is nicely correct in its generals, — perversely erro- 
neous in its particulars ; and no sooner does it quit its proper 
province, the general, for the particular, than there start up 
around it a multitude of solid objections, sternly to challenge 
it as a trespasser on grounds not its own. How infer, we may 
well ask the infidel, — admitting, for the argument's sake, that 
all the planets come under the law of geologic revolution, — 
how infer that they have all, or any of them save our own 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 363 

earth, arrived at the stage of stability and ripeness essential to 
a fully-developed creation, with a reasoning creature as its 
master-existence ? Look at the immense mass of Jupiter, and 
at that mysterious mantle of cloud, barred and streaked in the 
direction of his trade ivinds, that forever conceals his face. 
May not that dense robe of cloud be the ever-ascending steam 
of a globe that, in consequence of its vast bulk, has not suffi- 
ciently cooled down to be a scene of life at all ? Even the 
analogue of our Silurian creation may not yet have begun in 
Jupiter. Look, again, at Mercury, where it bathes in a flood 
of light, — enveloped within the sun's halo, like some forlorn 
smelter sweltering beside his furnace-mouth. A similar state 
of things may obtain on the surface of that planet, from a 
different, though not less adequate cause. But it is unneces- 
sary to deal further with an analogy so palpably overstrained, 
and whose aggressive place and position in a province not it? 
own so many unanswerable objections start up to elucidate 
and fix. 

The subject, however, is one which it would be difficult to 
exhaust. The Christian has nothing to fear, the infidel noth- 
ing to hope, from the great truths of geology. It is assuredly 
not through any enlargement of man's little apprehension of 
the Infinite and the Eternal that man's faith in the scheme of 
salvation by a Redeemer need be shaken. We are incalcula- 
bly more in danger from one unsubdued passion of our lower 
nature, even the weakest and the least, than from all that the 
astronomer has yet discovered in the depths of heaven, or the 
geologist in the bowels of the earth. If one's heart be right, it 
is surely a good, not an evil, that one's view should be ex- 
panded ; and geology is simply an expansion of view in the 
direction of the eternity that hath gone by. 

It is not less, but more sublime, to take one's stand on the 



364 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

summit of a lofty mountain, and thence survey the great (tcean 
over many broad regions, — over plains, and forests, and undu- 
lating tracts of hills, and blue remote promontories, and far- 
seen islands, — than to look forth on the same vast expanse 
from the level champaign, a single field's breadth from the 
shore. It can indeed be in part conceived from either point 
how truly sublime an object that ocean is, — how the voyagei 
may sail over it day after day, and yet see no land rise on the 
dim horizon, — how its numberless waves roll, and its great cur- 
rents ceaselessly flow, and its restless tides ever rise and fall, — 
how the lights of heaven are mirrored on its solitary surface, 
solitary, though the navies of a world be there, — and how, 
where plummet-line never sounded, and where life and light 
alike cease, it reposes with marble-like density, and more than 
Egyptian blackness, on the regions of a night on which there 
dawns no morning. But the larger view inspires the pro- 
founder feeling. The emotion is less overpowering, the con- 
ception less vivid, when from the humble flat we see but a 
band of water rising to where the sky rests, over a narrow 
selvage of land, than when, far beyond an ample breadth of 
foreground, and along an extended line of coast, and streaked 
with promontories and mottled with islands, and then spread- 
ing on and away in an ample plain of diluted blue, to the 
far horizon, we see the great ocean in its true character, wide 
and vast as human ken can descry. And such is the sublime 
prospect presented to the geologist, as he turns him towards 
the shoreless ocean of the upper eternity. The mere theolo- 
gian views that boundless expanse from a flat, and there lies 
in front of him but the narrow strip of the existing creation, — 
a green selvage of a field's breadth, fretted thick by the tombs 
of dead men ; while to the eye purged and strengthened by the 
euphrasy of science, the many vast regions of other creations, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 365 

— promontory beyond promontory, — island beyond island, — 
stretch out in sublime succession into that boundless ocean of 
eternity, whose sumless, irreducible area their vast extent fails 
to lessen by a single handbreadth, — that awful, inconceivable 
eternity, — God's past lifetime in its relation to God's finite 
creatures, — with relation to the infinite I AM himself, the in- 
divisible element of the eternal now. And there are thoughts 
which arise in connection with the ampler prospect, and anal- 
ogies, its legitimate produce, that have assuredly no tendency 
to confine man's aspirations, or cramp his cogitative energies, 
within the narrow precincts of mediocre unbelief. What mean 
the peculiar place and standing of our species in the great 
geologic week ? There are tombs everywhere : each succeed- 
ing region, as the eye glances upwards towards the infinite 
abyss, is roughened with graves ; the pages on which the his- 
tory of the past is written are all tombstones ; the inscriptions, 
epitaphs : we read the characters of the departed inhabitants 
in their sepulchral remains. And all these unreasoning creat- 
ures of the bygone periods — these humbler pieces of work- 
manship produced early in the week — died, as became their 
natures, without intelligence or hope. They perished ignorant 
of the past, and unanticipative of the future, — knowing not of 
the days that had gone before, nor recking of the days that 
were to come after. But not such the character of the last 
born of God's creatures, — the babe that came into being lato 
on the Saturday evening, and that now whines and murmurs 
away its time of extreme infancy during the sober hours of 
preparation for the morrow. Already have the quick eyes of 
the child looked abroaa upon all the past, and already has it 
noted why the passing time should be a time of sedulous dili- 
gence and expectancy. The work-day week draws fast to its 
close, and to-morrow is the Sabbath ! 
31* 



366 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

The Pen:y-a-mile Train and its Passengers. — Aunt Jonathan. — London 
by Night. — St. Paul's ; the City as seen from the Dome. — The Lord 
Mayor's Coach. — Westminster Abbey. — The Gothic Architecture a 
less exquisite Production of the Human Mind than the Grecian. — Poets' 
Corner. — The Mission of the Poets. — The Tombs of the Kings. — The 
Monument of James Watt. — A humble Coffee-house and its Frequent- 
ers. — The Woes of Genius in London. — Old 110, Thames-street. — 
The Tower. — The Thames Tunnel. — Longings of the True Londoner 
for Rural Life and the Country; their Influence on Literature. — The 
British Museum ; its splendid Collection of Fossil Remains. — Human 
Skeleton of Guadaloupe. — The Egyptian Room. — Domesticities of the 
Ancient Egyptians. — Cycle of Reproduction. — The Mummies. 

I must again take the liberty, as on a former occasion, of 
ante-dating a portion of my tour : I did not proceed direct to 
London from Olney; but as I have nothing interesting to record 
of my journeyings in the interval, I shall pursue the thread of 
my narrative as if I had. 

For the sake of variety, I had taken the penny-a-mile train ; 
and derived some amusement from the droll humors of my 
travelling companions, — a humbler, coarser, freer, and, withal, 
merrier section of the people, than the second-class travellers, 
whose acquaintance, in at least my railway peregrinations, I 
had chiefly cultivated hitherto. We had not the happiness of 
producing any very good jokes among us; but there were many 
laudable attempts ; and, though the wit was only tolerable, the 
laughter was hearty. There was an old American lady of the 
company, fresh from Yankee-land, who was grievously teased 
lor the general benefit ; but aunt Jonathan, though only indif- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 367 

ferently furnished with teeth, had an effective tongue ; and 
Mister Bull, in most of the bouts, came off but second best. 
The American, too, though the play proved now and then 
somewhat of a horse character, was evidently conscious that 
her country lost no honor by her, and seemed rather gratified 
than otherwise. There were from five-and-twenty to thirty 
passengers in the van ; among the rest, a goodly proportion of 
town-bred females, who mingled in the fan at least as freely as 
was becoming, and were smart, when they could, on the Amer-* 
ican ; and immediately beside the old lady there sat a silent, 
ruddy country girl, who seemed travelling to London to take 
service in some family. The old lady had just received a hit 
from a smart female, to whom she deigned no reply; but, turn- 
ing round to the country girl, she patted her on the shoulder, 
and tendered her a profusion of thanks for some nameless 
obligation which, she said, she owed to her. " La ! to me, 
ma'am ? " said the girl. — " Yes, to you, my pretty dear," said 
the American : " it is quite cheering to find one modest Eng- 
lishwoman among so few." The men laughed outrageously; 
the females did not like the joke half so well, and bridled up. 
And thus the war went on. The weather had been unprom- 
ising, — the night fell exceedingly dark and foul, — there were 
long wearisome stoppages at almost every station, — and it was 
within an hour of midnight, and a full hour and a half beyond 
the specified time of arrival, ere we entered the great city. I 
took my place in an omnibus, beside a half-open window, and 
away the vehicle trundled for the Strand. 

The night was extremely dreary ; the rain fell in torrents ; 
and the lamps, flickering and flaring in the wind, threw dismal 
gleams over the half-flooded streets and the wet pavement, 
revealing the pyramidal rain-drops as they danced by myriads 
in the pools, or splashed against the smooth slippery flagstones. 



368 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

The better shops were all shut, and there were but few lights 
in the windows : sober, reputable London seemed to have gone 
to its bed in the hope of better weather in the morning ; but 
here and there, as we hurried past the opening of some lane 
or alley, I could mark a dazzling glare of light streaming out 
into the rain from some low cellar, and see forlorn figures of 
ill-dressed men and draggled women flitting about in a style 
which indicated that London not sober and not reputable was 
still engaged in drinking hard drams. Some of the objects we 
passed presented in the uncertain light a ghostly-like wildness, 
which impressed me all the more, that I could but guess at 
their real character. And the guesses, in some instances, were 
sufficiently wide of the mark. I passed in New Eoad a singu- 
larly picturesque community of statues, which, in the uncertain 
light, seemed a parliament of spectres, held in the rain and the 
wind, to discuss the merits of the "Interment in Towns" Com- 
mission, somewhat in the style the two ghosts discussed, in 
poor Ferguson's days, in the Greyfriars' churchyard, the pro- 
posed investment of the Scotch Hospital funds in the Three 
per Cents. But I found in the morning that the picturesque 
parliament of ghosts were merely the chance-grouped figures 
of a stone-cutter's yard. The next most striking object I saw 
were the long ranges of pillars in Regent-street. They bore 
about them an air that I in vain looked for by day, of doleful, 
tomb-like grandeur, as the columns came in sight, one after 
one, in the thickening fog, and the lamps threw their paley 
gleams along the endless architrave. Then came Charing 
Cross, with its white jetting fountains, sadly disturbed in their 
play by the wind, and its gloomy, shade-like equestrians. And 
then I reached a quiet lodging-house in Hungerford-street, and 
tumbled, a little after midnight, into a comfortable bed. The 
morning arose as gloomily as the evening had closed ; and the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 369 

first sounds I heard, as I awoke, were the sharp patter of rain- 
drops on the panes, and the dash of water from the spouts on 
the pavement below. 

Towards noon, however, the rain ceased, and I sallied out to 
see London. I passed great and celebrated places, — Warren's 
great blacking establishment, and the great house of the outfit- 
ting Jew and his son, so celebrated in "Punch," and then the 
great "Punch's" own office, with great "Punch" himself, 
pregnant with joke, and larger than the life, standing sentinel 
over the door. And after just a little uncertain wandering, the 
uncertainty of which mattered nothing, as I could not possibly 
go wrong, wander where I might, I came full upon St. Paul's, 
and entered the edifice. It is comfortable to have only two- 
pence to pay for leave to walk over the area of so noble a pile, 
and to have to pay the twopence, too, to such grave, cleri- 
cal-looking men as the officials at the receipt of custom. It 
reminds one of the blessings of a religious establishment in a 
place where otherwise they might possibly be overlooked : no 
private company could afford to build such a pile as St. Paul's, 
and then show it for twopences. A payment of eighteenpence 
more opened my way to the summit of the dome, and I saw, 
laid fairly at my feet, all of London that the smoke and the 
weather permitted, in its existing state of dishabille, to come 
into sight. But though a finer morning might have presented 
me with a more extensive and more richly-colored prospect, it 
would scarce have given me one equally striking. I stood 
over the middle of a vast seething cauldron, and looked down 
through the blue reek on the dim indistinct forms that seemed 
parboiling within. The denser clouds were rolling away, but 
their huge volumes still lay folded all around on the outskirts 
of the prospect. I could see a long reach of the river, with its 
gigantic bridges striding across ; but loth ends o: the tide, like 



370 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

those of the stream seen by Mirza, were enveloped in dark 
ness; and the bridges, gray and unsolid-looking themselves, as 
if cut out of sheets of compressed vapor, seemed leading to a 
spectral city. Immediately in the foreground there lay a per- 
plexed labyrinth of streets and lanes, and untraceable ranges 
of buildings, that seemed the huddled-up fragments of a frac- 
tured puzzle, — difficult enough of resolution when entire, and 
rendered altogether unresolvable by the chance that had broken 
it. As the scene receded, only the larger and more prominent 
objects came into view, — here a spire, and there a monument, 
and yonder a square Gothic tower ; and as it still further re- 
ceded, I could see but the dim fragments of things, — bits of 
churches inwrought into the cloud, and the insulated pedi- 
ments and columned fronts of public buildings, sketched off in 
diluted gray. I was reminded of Sir Walter Scott's recipe for 
painting a battle : a great cloud to be got up as the first part 
of the process ; and as the second, here and there an arm or a 
leg stuck in, and here and there a head or a body. And such 
was London, the greatest city of the world, as I looked upon it 
this morning, for the first time, from the golden gallery of St. 
Paul's. 

The hour of noon struck on the great bell far below my feet; 
the pigmies in the thoroughfare of St. Paul's Yard, still further 
below, were evidently increasing in number and gathering into 
groups ; I could see faces that seemed no bigger than fists 
thickening in the windows, and dim little figures starting up 
on the leads of houses ; and then, issuing into the Yard from 
one of the streets, there came a long line of gay coaches, with 
the identical coach in the midst, all gorgeous and grand, 
that I remembered to have seen done in Dutch gold, full five- 
and-thirty years before, on the covers of a splendid sixpenny 
idition of " Whittington and his Cat." Hurrah for Whitting- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 371 

ton, Lord Mayor of London ! Without having once ba rgained 
for such a thing, — all unaware of what was awaiting me, — 1 
had ascended St. Paul's to see, as it proved, the Lord Mayor's 
procession. To be sure, I was placed rather high for witness- 
ing with the right feeling the gauds and the grandeurs. All 
human greatness requires to be set in a peculiar light, and does 
not come out to advantage when seen from either too near or 
too distant a point of view; and here the sorely-diminished 
pageant at my feet served rather provokingly to remind one of 
Addison's ant-hill scene of the Mayor emmet, with the bit of 
white rod in its mouth, followed by the long line of Aldermanic 
and Common Council emmets, all ready to possess themselves 
of the bit of white rod in their own behalf, should it chance to 
drop. Still, however, there are few things made of leather 
and prunello really grander than the Lord Mayor's procession. 
Slowly the pageant passed on arid away; the groups dis- 
persed in the streets, the faces evanished from the windows, 
the figures disappeared from the house-tops ; the entire appa- 
rition and its accompaniments melted into thin air, like the 
vision seen in the midst of the hollow valley of Bagdad ; and 
I saw but the dim city parboiling amid the clouds, and the 
long leaden-colored reach of the river bounding half the world 
of London, as the monstrous ocean snake of the Edda more 
than half encircles the globe. 

My next walk led to Westminster Abbey and the New 
Houses of Parliament, through St. James' Park. The un- 
promising character of the day had kept loungers at home ; 
and the dank trees dripped on the wet grass, and loomed large 
through the gray fog, in a scene of scarce less solitude, though 
the roar of the city was all around, than the trees of Sbenstone 
at the Leasowes. I walked leisurely once and agai a along 
the Abbey, as I had done at St. Paul's, to mark the general 



372 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

aspect and effect, and fix in my mind the proportions and true 
contour of the building. And the conclusion forced upon me 
was just that at which, times without number, I had invariably 
arrived before. The Gothic architecture, with all its solemn 
grandeur and beauty, is a greatly lower and less exquisite 
production of the human intellect than the architecture of 
Greece. The saintly legends of the middle ages are scarce 
less decidedly inferior to those fictions of the classic mythology 
which the greater Greek and Roman writers have sublimed 
into poetry. I have often felt that the prevailing bias in favor 
of everything mediaeval, so characteristic of the present time, 
from the theology and legislation of the middle ages, to their 
style of staining glass and illuminating manuscripts, cannot be 
other than a temporary eccentricity, — a mere cross freshet, 
chance-raised by some meteoric accident, — not one of the 
great permanent ocean-currents of tendency ; but never did the 
conviction press upon me more strongly than when enabled on 
this occasion to contrast the new architecture of St. Paul's with 
the old architecture of Westminster. Neiv ! Old! Modern! 
Ancient! The merits of the controversy lie summed up in 
these words. The new architecture is the truly ancient archi- 
tecture, while the old is comparatively modern : but the im- 
mortals are always young ; whereas the mortals, though their 
term of life may be as extended as that of Methuselah, grow 
old apace. The Grecian architecture will be always the new 
architecture ; and, let fashion play whatever vagaries it pleases, 
the Gothic will be always old. There is a wonderful amount 
of genius exhibited in the contour and filling up of St. Paul's. 
In passing up and down the river, which I did frequently 
during my short stay in London, my eye never wearied of 
resting on it : like all great works that have had the beautiful 
inwrought into their essence by the persevering touches of a 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 373 

master, the more I dwelt on it, the more exquisite it seemed to 
become. York Minster, the finest of English Gothic buildings, 
is perhaps equally impressive on a first survey ; but it exhibits 
no such soul of beauty as one dwells upon it, — it lacks the 
halo that forms around the dome of St. Paul's. I was not 
particularly struck by the New Houses of Parliament. They 
seem prettily got up to order, on a rich pattern, that must have 
cost the country a vast deal per yard ; and have a great many 
little bits of animation in them, which remind one of the 
communities of lives that dwell in compound corals, or of the 
divisible life, everywhere diffused and nowhere concentrated, 
that resides in poplars and willows ; but they want the one 
animating soul characteristic of the superior natures. Unlike 
the master-erection of Wren, they will not breathe out beauty 
into the minds of the future, as pieces of musk continue to 
exhale their odor for centuries. 

I walked through Poets' Corner, and saw many a familiar 
name on the walls : among others, the name of Dryden, familiar 
because he himself had made it so ; and the name of Shadwell, 
familiar because he had quarrelled with Dryden. There also 
I found the sepulchral slab of old cross John Dennis, famous 
for but his warfare with Pope and Addison ; and there, too, the 
statue of Addison at full length, not far from the periwigged 
effigy of the bluff English admiral that had furnished him with 
so good a joke. There, besides, may be seen the marble of the 
ancient descriptive poet Drayton ; and there the bust of poor 
eccentric Goldie, with his careless Irish face, who thought 
Drayton had no claim to such an honor, but whose own claim 
has been challenged by no one. I had no strong emotions to 
exhibit when pacing along the pavement in this celebrated 
place, nor would I have exhibited them if I had : and yet I did 
feel that I had derived much pleasure in my time from the men 
32 



374 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

whose names conferred honor on the wall. There was poor 
Goldsmith : he had been my companion for thirty years ; I had 
been first introduced to him through the medium of a common 
school collection, when a little boy in the humbJest English 
class of a parish school ; and I had kept up the acquaintance 
ever since. There, too, was Addison, whom I had known so 
long, and, in his true poems, his prose ones, had loved as 
much; and there were Gay, and Prior, and Cowley, and 
Thomson, and Chaucer, and Spenser, and Milton ; and there, 
too, on a slab on the floor, with the freshness of recent inter- 
ment still palpable about it, as if to indicate the race at least 
not long extinct, was the name of Thomas Campbell. I had 
got fairly among my patrons and benefactors. How often, shut 
out for months and years together from all literary converse 
with the living, had they been almost my only companions, — 
my unseen associates, who, in the rude work-shed, lightened 
my labors by the music of their numbers, and who, in my 
evening walks, that would have been so solitary save for them, 
expanded my intellect by the solid bulk of their thinking, and 
gave me eyes, by their exquisite descriptions, to look at nature ! 
How thoroughly, too, had they served to break down in my 
mind at least the narrower and more illiberal partialities of 
country, leaving untouched, however, all that was worthy of 
being cherished in my attachment to poor old Scotland ! I 
learned to deem the English poet not less my countryman than 
the Scot, if I but felt the true human heart beating in his 
bosom ; and the intense prejudices which I had imbibed when 
almost a child, from the fiery narratives of Blind Harry and of 
Barbour, melted away, like snow-wreaths from before the sun, 
under the genial influences of the glowing poesy of England. 
It is not the harp of Orpheus that will effectually tame the 
wild beast which lies ambushing in human nature, and is ever 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 375 

and anoi? breaking forth on the nations, in cruel, desolating 
war. The work of giving peace to the earth awaits those 
divine harmonies which breathe from the Lyre of Inspiration, 
when swept by the Spirit of God. And yet the harp of Or- 
pheus does exert an auxiliary power. It is of the nature of its 
songs, — so rich in the human sympathies, so charged with the 
thoughts, the imaginings, the hopes, the wishes, which it is the 
constitution of humanity to conceive and entertain, — it is of 
their nature to make us feel that the nations are all of one 
blood, — that man is our brother, and the world our country. 

The sepulchres of the old English monarchs, with all their 
obsolete grandeur, impressed me more feebly, though a few 
rather minute circumstances have, I perceive, left their stain p. 
Among the royal cemeteries we find the tombs of Mary of 
Scotland, and her great rival Elizabeth, with their respective 
effigies lying atop, cut in marble. And though the sculptures 
exhibit little of the genius of the modern statuary, the great 
care of their finish, joined to their unideal, unflattering indi- 
viduality, afford an evidence of their truth which productions 
of higher talent could scarce possess. How comes it, then, I 
would fain ask the phrenologist, that by far the finer head of 
me two should be found on the shoulders of the weaker woman? 
The forehead of Mary — poor Mary, who had a trick of fall- 
ing in love with "pretty men" but no power of governing 
them — is of very noble development, — broad, erect, powerful ; 
while that of Elizabeth, — of queenly, sagacious Elizabeth, — 
who could both fall in love with men and govern them too, and 
who was unquestionably a great monarch, irrespective of sex, — • 
is a poor, narrow, pinched-up thing, that rises tolerably erect 
for one-half its height, and then slopes abruptly away. The 
next things that caught my eye were two slabs of Egyptian 
porphyry, — a well-marked stone, with the rich purple ground 



376 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

spotted white and pink, — inli.d as panels in the tomb of 
Edward the First. Whence, in the days cf Edward, could the 
English stone-cutter have procured Egyptian porphyry ? I was 
enabled to form at least a guess on the subject, from possessing 
a small piece of exactly the same stone, which had been picked 
up amid heaps of rubbish in the deep rocky ravine of Siloam, 
and which, as it does not occur in situ in Judea, was supposed 
to have formed at one time a portion of the Temple. Is it not 
probable that these slabs, which, so far as is yet known, Europe 
?ould not have furnished, were brought by Edward, the last 
of the crusading princes of England, from the Holy Land, to 
confer sanctity on his place of burial, — mayhap originally, — 
though Edward himself never got so far, — from that identical 
ravine of Siloam which supplied my specimen? It was not 
uncommon for the crusader to take from Palestine the earth in 
which his body was to be deposited ; and if Edward succeeded 
in procuring a genuine bit of the true Temple, and an exceed- 
ingly pretty bit to boot, it seems in meet accordance with the 
character of the age that it should have been borne home with 
him in triumph, to serve a similar purpose. I was a good deal 
struck, in one of the old chapels, — a little gloomy place, filled 
with antique regalities sorely faded, and middle-age glories 
waxed dim, — by stumbling, very unexpectedly, on a noble 
slatue of James Watt. The profoundly contemplative counte- 
nance — so happily described by Arago as a very personifica- 
tion of abstract thought — contrasted strongly with the chivalric 
baubles and meaningless countenances on the surrounding 
tombs. The new and the old governing forces — the waxing 
and the waning powers — seemed appropriately typified in 
that little twilight chapel. 

My next free day — for, of the four days I remained in Lon- 
don, I devote i each alternate one to the British Museum — 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 377 

spent in wandering everywhere, and looking at everything, — 
in going up and down the river in steamboats, and down and 
athwart the streets on omnibuses. I took my meals in all 
sorts of odd-looking places. I breakfasted one morning in an 
exceedingly poor-looking coffee-house, into which I saw several 
people dressed in dirty moleskin enter, just that I might see 
how the people who dress in dirty moleskin live in London. 
Some of them made, I found, exceedingly little serve as a 
meal. One thin-faced, middle-aged man brought in a salt 
herring with him, which he gave to the waiter to get roasted ; 
and the roasted salt herring, with a penny's worth of bread and 
a penny's worth of coffee, formed his breakfast. Another 
considerably younger and stouter man, apparently not more a 
favorite of fortune, brought in with him an exceedingly small 
bit of meat, rather of the bloodiest, stuck on a wooden pin, 
which he also got roasted by the waiter, and which he supple- 
mented with a penny's worth of coffee and but a halfpenny's 
worth of bread. 1 too, that I might experience for one forenoon 
the sensations of the London poor, had my penny's worth of 
coffee, and, as I had neither meat nor herring, my three-half- 
penny worth of bread ; but both together formed a breakfast 
rather of the lightest, and so I dined early. There is a passage 
which I had read in Goldsmith's " History of the Earth and 
Animated Nature " many years before, which came painfully 
into my mind on this occasion. The poor poet had sad expe- 
rience in his time of the destitution of London ; and when he 
came to discourse as a naturalist on some of the sterner wants 
of the species, the knowledge which he brought to bear on the 
subject was of a deeply tragic cast. " The lower race of 
animals," he says, " when satisfied, for the instant moment are 
perfectly happy; but it is otherwise with man. His mind 
anticipates distress, and feels the pangs of want even before 
32* 



378 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

they arrest him. Thus, the mind being continually harassed 
by the situation, it at length influences the constitution, and 
unfits it for aL its functions. Some cruel disorder, but nowise 
like hunger, seizes the unhappy sufferer; so that almost all 
those men who have thus long lived by chance, and whose 
every day may be considered as a happy escape from famine, 
are known at last to die in reality of a disorder caused by hun- 
ger, but which, in the common language, is often called a 
broken heart. Some of these I have known myself when very 
little able to relieve them; and I have been told by a very 
active and worthy magistrate, that the number of such as die 
in London for want is much greater than one would imagine, 
— I think he talked of two thousand in a year." 

Rather a curious passage this to occur in a work of Natural 
History. It haunted me a while this morning : the weather, 
though no longer wet, was exceedingly gloomy; and I felt 
depressed as I walked along the muddy streets, and realized, 
with small effort, the condition of the many thousands who, 
without friends or home, money or employment, have had to 
endure the mingled pangs of want and anxiety in London. I 
remembered, in crossing Westminster Bridge to take boat on 
the Surrey side, that the poet Crabbe walked on it all night, 
when, friendless, in distress and his last shilling expended, 
he had dropped, at the door of Edmund Burke, the touching 
letter on which his last surviving hope depended. The Thames 
was turbid with the rains, — the tide was out, — and melan- 
choly banks of mud, here and there overtopped by thickets of 
grievously befouled sedges, lay along its sides. One straggling 
thicket, just opposite the gloomy Temple Gardens, — so soli- 
tary in the middle of a great city, — had caught a tattered 
jacket; and the empty sleeve, stretched against the taller 
sedges seemed a human arm raised above the unsolid ooze. 



FA 1-LAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 379 

The scene appeared infinitely better suited than that drawn by 
the bard of Rhysdale, to remind one 

" Of mighty poets in their misery dead." 

Here it was that Otway perished of hunger, — Butler, in great 
neglect, — starving Chatterton, of poison. And these were the 
very streets which Richard Savage and Samuel Johnson had 
so often walked from midnight till morning, having at the time 
no roof under which to shelter. Pope summons up old Father 
Thames, in his "Windsor Forest," to tell a silly enough story: 
how strangely different, how deeply tragic, would be the real 
stories which Father Thames could tell ! Many a proud heart, 
quenched in despair, has forever ceased to beat beneath his 
waters. Curiously enough, the first thing I saw, on stepping 
ashore at London Bridge, was a placard, intimating that on the 
previous night a gentleman had fallen over one of the bridges, 
and offering a reward of twenty shillings for the recovery of 
the body. 

There was a house in Upper Thames-street which I was de- 
sirous to see. I had had no direct interest in it for the last five- 
and-twenty years : the kind relative who had occupied it when 
I was a boy had long been in his grave, — a far distant one, 
beyond the Atlantic; and 110 Upper Thames-street might, for 
aught I knew, be now inhabited by a Jew or a Mahometan. 
But I had got some curious little books sent me from it, at a 
time when my books were few and highly valued; and I could 
not leave London without first setting myself to seek out the 
place they had come from. Like the tomb of the lovers, how- 
ever, which Tristram Shandy journeyed to Lyons to see, and 
saw, instead, (merely the place where the tomb had been, I 
found that old 1 10 had disappeared : and a tall modern erec- 



3S0 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

tion, the property of some great company, occupied its site. 1 
next walked on through the busiest streets I had ever seen, 

" With carts, and cars, and coaches, roaring all," 

to Tower Hill ; and saw the crown jewels of England, and the 
English history done in iron, — for such is the true character 
of the old armory, containing the mailed effigies of the English 
kings. I saw, too, the cell in which imprisoned Raleigh wrote 
his "History of the World;" and the dark narrow dungeon, 
with its rude stone arch, and its bare walls, painfully lettered, 
as with a nail-point, furnished me with a new vignette, by 
which to illustrate in imagination some of the most splendid 
poetry ever written in prose. From the Tower I walked on to 
explore that most ingenious work and least fortunate undertak- 
ing of modern times, — the Thames Tunnel ; and found it so 
extremely like the ordinary prints given of it in the " Penny 
Magazine " and elsewhere, that I could scarcely believe I had 
not seen it before. There were a good many saunterers, like 
myself, walking up and down along the pavement, now cheap- 
ening some of the toys exhibited for sale in the cross arches, 
and now listening to a Welsh harper who was filling one of the 
great circular shafts with sound ; but not a single passenger 
did I see. The common English have a peculiar turn for pos- 
sessing themselves of almost-irwpossibilities of the reel-in-the- 
bottle class ; and a person who drew rather indifferent profiles 
in black seemed to be driving a busy trade among the visiters. 
The great charm appeared to lie in the fact that the outlines 
produced were outlines of their very selves, taken under the 
Thames. I spent the rest of the day in riding along all the 
greater streets on the tops of omnibuses, and in threading 
some of the more characteristic lanes on foot. Nothing more 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 381 

surprised me, in my peripatetic wanderings, than to find, when 
I had now and then occasion to inquire my way, that the Lon- 
doners do not know London. The monster city of which they 
are so proud seems, like other very great ones of the earth, to 
have got beyond the familiarities of intimate acquaintance with 
even the men who respect it most. 

I learned not to wonder, as I walked along the endless 
labyrinth of streets, and saw there was no such thing for a 
pedestrian as getting fairly into the country, that the literature 
of London — its purely indigenous literature — should be of 
so rural a character. The mere wayside beauties of nature, — 
green trees, and fresh grass, and soft mossy hillocks sprinkled 
over with harebells and daisies, and hawthorn bushes gray in 
blossom, and slender woodland streamlets, with yellow prim- 
roses looking down upon them from their banks, — things com- 
mon and of little mark to at least the ordinary men that live 
among them, — must be redolent of poetry to even the ordinary 
Londoner, who, removed far from their real presence, contem- 
plates them in idea through an atmosphere of intense desire. 
There are not a few silly things in what has been termed the 
Cockney school of poetry : in no other school does a teasing 
obscurity hover so incessantly on the edge of no meaning, or is 
the reader so much in danger of embracing, like one of the old 
mythologic heroes, a cloud for a goddess. But I can scarce 
join in the laugh raised against its incessant "babble about 
green fields," or marvel that, in its ceaseless talk of flowers, its 
language should so nearly resemble that of Turkish love-letters 
composed of nosegays. Its style is eminently true to London 
nature, — which, of course, is simply human nature in London, 
— in the ardent desire widen it breathes for rural quiet, and 
the green sunshiny solitude of the country. " Shapes of 
beauty," according to one of its masters, — poor Keats, — 



3S2 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

" Move away the pall 
From the tired spirit." 

And thtr. he tells us what some of those shapes of beL uty are, — 

" Such the sun, the moon, 
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon 
For simple sheep ; and such are daffodils 
With the green world they live in ; and clear rills, 
That for themselves a cooling covert make 
'Gainst the hot season ; the mid-forest brake, 
Kich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms." 

Keats, the apprentice of a London surgeon, was an overtoiled 
young man in delicate health, cooped up by his employment 
the whole week round for years together ; and in this charac- 
teristic passage, — puerile enough, it must be confessed, and 
yet poetical too, — we have the genuine expression of the true 
city calenture under which he languished. But perhaps no- 
where in the compass of English poetry is there a more truth- 
ful exhibition of the affection than in Wordsworth's picture of 
the hapless town girl, poor Susan. She is in the heart of the 
city, a thoughtless straggler along the busy streets, when a 
sudden burst of song from an encaged thrush hung against the 
wall touches the deeply-seated feeling, and transports her far 
and away into the quiet country, where her days of innocency 
had been spent. 

" What ails her ? She sees 
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees ; 
Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide, 
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. 
Green pastures she views in the midst of the vale, 
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail * 
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, 
The only one dwelling on earth that she loves." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 383 

It is an interesting enough fact, that from the existence of 
this strong appetite for the rural intensified into poetry by 
those circumstances which render all attempts at its gratifica- 
tion mere tantalizing snatches, that whet rather than satisfy, 
the influence of great cities on the literature of a country 
should be, not to enhance the artificia., but to impart to the 
natural prominence and value. The "Farmer's Boy" of 
Bloomfield was written in a garret in the midst of London ; 
and nowhere perhaps in the empire has it been read with a 
deeper relish than by the pale country-sick artisans and clerks 
of the neighboring close courts and blind alleys. Nowhere 
have Thomson, Cowper, and Crabbe, with the poets of the 
Lake School, given a larger amount of pleasure than in Lon- 
don; and when London at length came to produce a school of 
poetry exclusively its own, it proved one of the graver faults of 
its productions, that they were too incessantly descriptive, and 
too exclusively rural. 

I spent, as I have said, two days at the British Museum, and 
wished I could have spent ten. And yet the ten, by extending 
my index acquaintance with the whole, would have left me 
many more unsettled points to brood over than the two. It is 
an astonishing collection ; and very astonishing is the history 
of creation and the human family which it forms. Such, it 
strikes me, is the proper view in which to regard it : it is a 
great, many-chaptered work of authentic history, beginning 
with the consecutive creations, — dwelling at great length 
on the existing one, — taking up and pursuing through many 
sections the master production, Man, — exhibiting in the Egyp- 
tian section, not only what he did, but what he was, — illus- 
trating in the Grecian and Roman sections the perfectibility 
of his conceptions in all that relates to external form, — indi- 
cating in the middle-age section a refolding of his previously- 



384 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

developed powers, as if they had shrunk under some chill and 
wintry influence, — exhibiting in the concluding section a 
broader and more general blow of sentiment and faculty than 
that of his earlier spring-time, — nay, demonstrating the fact of 
a more confirmed maturity, in the very existence and arrange- 
ment of such a many-volumed History of the Earth and its 
productions as this great collection constitutes. I found, in the 
geological department, — splendid, as an accumulation of noble 
specimens, beyond my utmost conception, — that much still 
remains to be done in the way of arrangement, — a very great 
deal even in the way of further addition. The work of impart- 
ing order to the whole, though in good hands, seems barely 
begun ; and years must elapse ere it can be completed with 
reference to even the present stage of geologic knowledge. 
But how very wonderful will be the record which it will then 
form of those earlier periods of our planet, — its ages of infancy, 
childhood, and immature youth, — which elapsed ere its con- 
nection with the moral and the responsible began ! From the 
Graptolite of the Grauwacke slate, to the fossil human skeleton 
of Guadaloupe, what a strange list of births and deaths — of 
the production and extinction of races — will it not exhibit! 
Even in its present half-arranged condition, I found the gen 
eral progressive history of the animal kingdom strikingly indi- 
cated. In the most ancient section, — that of the Silurian 
system, — there are corals, molluscs, Crustacea. In the Old 
Red, — for the fish of the Upper Ludlow rock are wanting, — 
the vertebrae begin. By the way, I found that almost all the 
older ichthyolites in this section of the Museum had been of 
my own gathering, — specimens I had laid open on the shores 
of the Cromarty Frith some ten or twelve years ago. Upwards 
through the Coal Measures I saw nothing higher than the rep- 
tile fish. With the Lias comes a splendid array of the extinct 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 385 

reptiles. The Museum contains perhaps the finest collection 
of these in the world. The earlier Tertiary introduces us to 
the strange mammals of the Paris Basin, — the same system, 
in its second stage, to the Dinotherium of Darmstadt and the 
Megatherium of Buenos Ayres. A still later period brings before 
us the great elephantine family, once so widely distributed over 
the globe : we arrive at a monstrous skeleton, entire from head 
to heel: 'tis that of the gigantic mastodon of North America, — 
a creature that may have been contemporary with the earlier 
hunter tribes of the New World ; and just beside it, last in the 
long series, we find the human skeleton of Guadaloupe. Mys- 
terious frame-work of bone locked up in the solid marble, — 
unwonted prisoner of the rock ! — an irresistible voice shall yet 
call thee from out the stony matrix. The other organisms, thy 
partners in the show, are incarcerated in the lime forever, — 
thou but for a term. How strangely has the destiny of the 
race to which thou belongest re-stamped with new meanings 
the old phenomena of creation ! I marked, as I passed along, 
the prints of numerous rain-drops indented in a slab of sand- 
stone. And the entire record, from the earliest to the latest 
times, is a record of death. When that rain-shower descended, 
myriads of ages ago, at the close of the Palaeozoic period, the 
cloud, just where it fronted the sun, must have exhibited its 
bow of many colors ; and then, as now, nature, made vital in 
the inferior animals, would have clung to life with the instinct 
of self-preservation, and shrunk with dismay and terror from 
the approach of death. But the prismatic bow strided across 
the gloom, in blind obedience to a mere optical Jaw, bearing 
inscribed on its gorgeous arch no occult meaning; and death, 
whether by violence or decay, formed in the general economy 
but a clearing process, through which the fundamental law of 
increase found space to operate. But when thou wert living 
33 



386 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

prisoner of the marble, haply as an Indian wife and mother, 
ages ere the keel of Columbus had disturbed the waves of the 
Atlantic, the high standing of thy species had imparted new 
meanings to death and the rainbow. The prismatic arch had 
become the bow of the covenant, and death a great sign of the 
unbending justice and purity of the Creator, and of the aber- 
ration and fall of the living soul, formed in the Creator's own 
image, — reasoning, responsible man. 

Of those portions of the Museum which illustrate the history 
of the human mind in that of the arts, I was most impressed 
by the Egyptian section. The utensils which it exhibits that 
associate with the old domesticities of the Egyptians — the 
little household implements which had ministered to the lesser 
comforts of the subjects of the Pharaohs — seem really more 
curious, — at any rate, more strange in their familiarity, — than 
those exquisite productions of genius, the Laocoons, and Apollo 
Belvideres, and Venus de Medicis, and Phidian Jupiters, and 
Elgin marbles, which the Greek and Roman sections exhibit. 
We have served ourselves heir to what the genius of the 
ancient nations has produced, — to their architecture, their 
sculpture, their literature ; our conceptions piece on to theirs 
with so visible a dependency, that we can scarce imagine what 
they would have been without them. We have been running 
new metal into our castings, artistic and intellectual ; but it is 
the ancients who, in most cases, have furnished the moulds. 
And so, though the human mind walks in an often-returning 
circle of thought and invention, and we might very possibly 
have struck out for ourselves not a few of the Grecian ideas, 
even had they all perished during the middle ages, — just as 
Shakspeare struck out for himself not a little of the classical 
thinking and imagery, — we are at least in doubt regarding the 
extent to which this would have taken place. We know not 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE 3S7 

whether our chance reproduction of Grecian idea wou d have 
been such a one as the reproduction of Egyptian statuary 
exhibited in the aboriginal Mexican sculptures, or the repro- 
duction of Runic tracery palpable in the Polynesian carvings, 
— or whether our inventions might not have expatiated, without 
obvious reproduction at all, in types indigenously Gothic. As 
heirs of the intellectual wealth of the ancients, and inheritors 
of the treasures which their efforts accumulated, we know not 
what sort of fortunes we would have carved out for ourselves, 
had we been left to our own unassisted exertions. But we 
surely did not fall heir to the domestic inventions of the Egyp- 
tians. Their cooks did not teach ours how to truss fowls ; nor 
did their bakers show ours how to ferment their dough or mould 
their loaves ; nor could we have learned from them a hundred 
other household arts, of which we find both the existence and 
the mode of existence indicated by the antiquities of this sec- 
tion ; and yet, the same faculty of invention which they pos- 
sessed, tied down in our as in their case by the wants of a 
common nature to expatiate in the same narrow circle of neces- 
sity, has reproduced them all. Invention in this case has been 
but restoration ; and we find that, in the broad sense of the 
Preacher, it has given us nothing new. What most impressed 
me, however, were the Egyptians themselves, — the men of 
three thousand years ago, still existing entire in their frame- 
work of bone, muscle, and sinew. It struck me as a very 
wonderful truth, in the way in which truths great in them- 
selves, but commonplaced by their familiarity, do sometimes 
strike, that the living souls should still exist which had once 
animated these withered and desiccated bodies ; and that in 
their separate state they had an interest in the bodies still. 
This much, amid all their darkness, even the old Egyptians 
knew ; and this we — save where the vitalities of revela 



388 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

tion influence — seem to be fast unlearning-. It does appear 
strange, that men ingenious enough to philosophize on the 
phenomena of the parental relation, on the mysterious connec- 
tion of parent and child, its palpable adaptation to the feelings 
of the human heart, and its vast influence on the destinies of 
the species, should yet find in the doctrine of the resurrection 
but a mere target against which to shoot their puny material- 
isms. It does not seem unworthy of the All Wise, by whom 
the human heart was moulded and the parental relation de- 
signed, that the immature " boy " of the present state of exist- 
ence should be " father to the man " in the next ; and that, as 
spirit shall be identical with spirit, — the responsible agent with 
the panel at the bar, — so body shall be derived from body, and 
the old oneness of the individual be thus rendered complete, 

*'• Bound each to each by natural piety." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 389 



CHAPTER XIX. 

Harrow-on- the-Hill. — Descent through the Formations from the Tertiary 
to the Coal Measures. — Journey of a Hundred and Twenty Miles North- 
wards iientical, geologically, with a journey of a Mile and a Quarter 
Downwards. — English very unlike Scottish Landscape in its Geologic 
Framework. — Birmingham Fair. — Credulity of the Rural English; 
striking Contrast which they furnish, in this Respect, to their Country- 
men of the Knowing Type. — The English Grades of Intellectual Char- 
acter of Immense Range ; more in Extremes than those of the Scotch. — 
Front Rank of British Intellect in which there stands no Scotchman ; 
prohabie Cause. — A Class of English, on the other Hand, greatly lower 
than the Scotch ; naturally less Curious ; acquire, in Consequence, less 
of the Developing Pabulum. — The main Cause of the Difference to be 
found, however, in the very dissimilar Religious Character of the two 
Countries. — The Scot naturally less independent than the Englishman ; 
strengthened, however, where his Character most needs Strength, by 
ais Religion. — The Independence of the Englishman subjected at the 
present Time to two distinct Adverse Influences, — the Modern Poor Law 
and the Tenant-at-will System. — Walsall. — Liverpool. — Sort of Lodg- 
ing-houses in which one is sure to meet many Dissenters. 

On the fifth morning I quitted London on my way north, 
without having once seen the sun shine on the city or ifa 
environs. But the weather at length cleared up ; and as the 
train passed Harrow-on-the-Hill, the picturesque buildings on 
the acclivity, as they looked out in the sunshine, nest-like, 
from amid their woods just touched with yellow, made a pic- 
ture not unworthy of those classic recollections with which the 
place is so peculiarly associated. 

The railway, though its sides are getting fast covered over 
with grass and debris, still furnishes a tolerably adequate sec- 
tion of the geology of this part of England. We pass, at an 
33* 



390 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

early stage of our journey, through the London Clay, and then 
see rising from under it the Chalk, — the first representative of 
an entirely different state of things from that which obtained 
in the Tertiary, and the latest written record of that Secondary 
d) nasty at whose terminal line, if we except one or two doubt- 
fu. shells, on which it is scarce safe to decide, all that had 
previously existed ceased to exist forever. The lower mem- 
bers of the Cretaceous group are formed of materials of too 
yielding a nature to be indicated in the section ; but the Oolite, 
on which they rest, is well marked ; and we see its strata rising 
from beneath, as we pass on to lower and yet lower depths, till 
at length we reach the Lias, its base, and then enter on the 
Upper New Ked Sandstone. Deeper and yet deeper strata 
emerge ; and at the commencement of the Lower New Red 
we reach another great terminal line, where the Secondary 
dynasty ends, and the Palaeozoic begins. We still pass down- 
wards ; encounter at Walsall a misplaced patch of Silurian, — 
a page transferred from the earlier leaves of the volume, and 
stuck into a middle chapter ; and then enter on the Coal Meas- 
ures, — the extremest depth to which we penetrate, in regular 
sequence, on this line. Our journey northwards from London 
to Wolverhampton has been also a journey downwards along 
the geologic scale ; but while we have travelled northwards 
along the surface about a hundred and twenty miles, we have 
travelled downwards into the earth's crust not more than a mile 
and a quarter. Our descent has been exceedingly slow, for 
the strata have lain at very low angles. And hence the flat 
character of the country, so essentially different from that of 
Scotland. The few hills which we pass, — if hills they may 
be termed, — mere flat ridges, that stretch, rib-like, athwart the 
landscape, — are, in most cases, but harder beds of rock, inter- 
calated with the softei ones, and that, relieved by the denuding 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 391 

agenc es, stand up in bolder prominence over the general level. 
Not a i eruptive rock appears in the entire line on to Walsall 
How v;3iy different the framework of Scottish landscape, as 
exhibited in the section laid bare by the Edinburgh and Glas- 
gow Railway ! There, almost every few hundred yards in the 
line brings the traveller to a trap-rock, against which he finds 
the strata tilted at every possible angle of elevation. Here the 
beds go up, there they go down ; in this eminence they are 
elevated, saddle-like, on the back of some vast eruptive mass ; 
in yonder hill, overflown by it. The country around exists as 
a tumultuous sea, raised into tempest of old by the fiery ground- 
swell from below; while on the skirts of the prospect there 
stand up eminences of loftier altitude, characteristically marked 
in profile by their terrace-like precipices, that rise over each 
other step by step, — their trap-stairs* of trappean rock, — for 
to this scenic peculiarity the volcanic rocks owe their generic 
name. 

1 found Birmingham amid the bustle of its annual fair, and 
much bent on gayety and sight-seeing. There were double 
rows of booths along the streets, a full half-mile in length, — 
gingerbread booths, and carraway and barley-sugar booths, and 
nut and apple booths, and booths rich in halfpenny dolls and 
penny trumpets, and booths not particularly rich in anything 
that seemed to have been run up on speculation. There were 
shows, too, of every possible variety of attraction, — shows of 
fat boys, and large ladies, and little men, and great serpents 
and wise ponies ; and shows of British disaster in India, and 
of British successes in China ; madcap-minded merry-andrews, 
who lived on their wits, nor wished for more ; agile tumblers, 
glittering in tinsel ; swings, revolvers, and roundabouts ; and 
old original Punch, in a .1 his glory. But what formed by far 

* Trap-stairs • Scotice, a stair of one flight. 



392 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the best part of the exhibition were the round, ruddy, unthink- 
ing face 5 of the country-bred English, that had poured into 
town, to stare, wonder, purchase, and be happy. It was worth 
while paying one's penny for a sight of the fat boys and the 
little men, just to see the eager avidity with which they were 
seen, and the total want of suspicion with which all that was 
told regarding them was received. The countrywoman who, 
on seeing a negro for the first time, deemed him the painted 
monster of a show, and remarked that " mony was the way 
tried to wyle awa' the penny," betrayed her country not less by 
her suspicion than by her tongue. An Englishwoman of the 
true rural type would have fallen into the opposite mistake, of 
deeming some painted monster a reality. Judging, however, 
from what the Birmingham fair exhibited, I am inclined to 
hold that the preponderance of enjoyment lies on the more 
credulous side. I never yet encountered a better-pleased 
people : the very spirit of the fair seemed embodied in the 
exclamation of a pretty little girl from the country, whom I saw 
clap her hands as she turned the corner of a street where the 
prospect first burst upon her, and shriek out, in a paroxysm of 
delight, " 0, what lots of — lots of shows ! " And yet, certainly, 
the English character does lie very much in extremes. Among 
the unthinking, unsuspicious, blue-eyed, fair-complexioned, hon- 
est Saxons that crowded the streets, I could here and there 
detect, in gangs and pairs, some of the most disagreeably smart- 
looking men I almost ever saw, — men light of finger and 
sharp of wit, — full of all manner of contrivance, and devoid 
of all sort of moral principle. 

Nothing in the English character so strikingly impressed me 
as its immense extent of range across the intellectual scale. It 
resembles those musical instruments of great compass, such as 
the pianoforte ?.nd the harpsichord, that sweep over the entire 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 393 

gamut, from the lowest note to the highest ; whereas the intel- 
lectual character of the Scotch, like instruments of a narrower 
range, such as the harp and the violin, lies more in the middle 
of the scale. By at least one degree it does not rise so high ; 
by several degrees it does not sink so low. There is an order 
of English mind to which Scotland has not attained : our first 
men stand in the second rank, not a foot-breadth behind the 
foremost of England's second-rank men ; but there is a front 
rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman. 
Like that class of the mighty men of David, to which Abishai 
and Benaiah belonged, — great captains, who went down into 
pits in the time of snow and slew lions, or " who lifted up the 
spear against three hundred men at once, and prevailed," — 
they attain not, with all their greatness, to the might of the 
first class. Scotland has produced no Shakspeare ; — Burns 
and Sir Walter Scott united would fall short of the stature of 
the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representa- 
tive. A Scotch poet has been injudiciously named as not 
greatly inferior ; but I shall not do wrong to the memory of an 
ingenious young man, cut off just as he had mastered his 
powers, by naming him again in a connection so perilous. He 
at least was guiltless of the comparison ; and it would be cruel 
to involve him in the ridicule which it is suited to excite. 
Bacon is as exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively 
English ; and though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotch- 
man, we have certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac. I question, in- 
deed, whether any Scotchman attains to the powers of Locke : 
there is as much solid thinking in the " Essay on the Human 
Understanding," greatly as it has become the fashion of the 
age to depreciate it, and notwithstanding its fundamental error, 
as in the works of all our Scotch metaphysicians put together. 
It is, however, 1 curious fact, and worthy, certainly, of careful 



394 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

examination, as bearing on the question of development purely 
through the force of circumstances, that all the very great men 
of England — all its first-class men — belong to ages during 
which the grinding persecutions of the Stuarts repressed Scot- 
tish energy, and crushed the opening mind of the country; 
and that no sooner was the weight removed, like a pavement- 
slab from over a flower-bed, than straightway Scottish intellect 
sprung up, and attained to the utmost height to which English 
intellect was rising at the time. The English philosophers 
and literati of the eighteenth century were of a greatly lower 
stature than the Miltons and Shakspeares, Bacons and New- 
tons, of the two previous centuries : they were second-class 
men, — the tallest, however, of their age anywhere; and 
among these the men of Scotland take no subordinate place. 
Though absent from the competition in the previous century, 
through the operation of causes palpable in the history of the 
time, we find them quite up to the mark of the age in which 
they appear. No English philosopher for the last hundred and 
fifty years produced a greater revolution in human affairs than 
Adam Smith, or exerted a more powerful influence on opinion 
than David Hume, or did more to change the face of the me- 
chanical world than James Watt. The " History of England " 
produced by a Scotchman is still emphatically the " English 
History ; " nor, with all its defects, is it likely to be soon super- 
seded. Robertson, if inferior in the untaught felicities of nar- 
ration to his illustrious countryman, is at least inferior to none 
of his English contemporaries. The prose fictions of Smollett 
have kept their ground quite as well as those of Fielding, and 
better than those of Richardson. Nor does England during 
the century exhibit higher manifestations of the poetic spirit 
than those exhibited by Thomson and by Burns. To use a 
aomely but exoressive Scoticism, Scotland seems to have losi 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 395 

her bairn-time of the giants; but in the after baira-time of 
merely tall men, her children were quite as tall as any of their 
contemporaries. 

Be this as it may, however, it is unquestionable that Eng- 
land has produced an order of intellect to which Scotland has 
not attained ; and it does strike as at least curious, in connec- 
tion with the fact that the English, notwithstanding, should as 
a people stand on a lower intellectual level than the Scotch. 
I have had better opportunities of knowing the common people 
of Scotland than most men ; I have lived among them for the 
greater part of my life, and I belong to them ; and when in 
England, I made it my business to see as much as possible of 
the common English people. I conversed with them south 
and north, and found them extremely ready — for, as I have 
already had occasion to remark, they are much franker than 
the Scotch — to exhibit themselves unbidden. And I have no 
hesitation in affirming, that their minds lie much more pro- 
foundly asleep than those of the common people of Scotland. 
We have no class north of the Tweed that corresponds with 
the class of ruddy, round-faced, vacant English, so abundant 
in the rural districts, and whose very physiognomy, derived 
during the course of centuries from untaught ancestors, indi- 
cates intellect yet unawakened. The reflective habits of the 
Scottish people have set their stamp on the national counte- 
nance. What strikes the Scotch traveller in this unawakened 
class of the English, is their want of curiosity regarding the 
unexciting and the unexaggerated, — things so much on the 
ordinary level as to be neither prodigies nor shows. Let him 
travel into the rural districts of the Scotch Highlands, and he 
will find the inquisitive element all in a state of ferment 
regarding himself. He finds every Highlander he meets adroit 
of fence, in planting upon him as many queries as can possibly 



396 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

be thrust in, and in warding off every query directed against 
himself. The wayside colloquy resolves itself into a sort of 
sword-and-buckler match : and he must be tolerably cunning in 
thrusting and warding who proves an overmatch for the High- 
lander.^ And in the Lowlands of Scotland, though in perhaps 



* One of the most amusing sketches of this sort of sword-and-buckler 
play which I have anywhere seen may be found in Macculloch's " Travels 
in the Western and Northern Highlands. ' ' Were I desirous to get up a 
counter sketch equally characteristic of the incurious communicative turn 
of the English, I would choose as my subject a conversation — if conver- 
sation that could be called in which the speaking was all on the one side 

— into which I entered with an Englishman near Stourbridge. He gave 
me first his own history, and then his father and mother's history, with 
occasional episodes illustrative of the condition and prospects of his three 
aunts and his two uncles, and wound up the whole by a detail of certain 
love passages in the biography of his brother, who was pledged to a solid 
Scotchwoman, but who had resolved not to get married until his sweet- 
heart and himself, who were both in service, should have saved a little 
more money. And all that the narrator knew of me, in turn, or wished 
to know, was simply that I was a Scot, and a good listener. Maccul- 
loch's sketch, however, of the inquisitive Highlander, would have decid- 
edly the advantage over any sketch of mine of the incurious Englishman : 
his dialogue is smart, compact, and amusing, though perhaps a little 
dashed with caricature ; whereas the Englishman's narratives were long, 
prosy, and dull. The scene of the dialogue furnished by the traveller is 
laid in Glen Ledmack, where he meets a snuffy-looking native cutting 
grass with a pocket-knife, and asks, — "How far is it to Killin ? " — 
"It's a fine day." — "Ay, it's a fine day for your hay." — "Ah! 
there 's no muckle hay ; this is an unco cauld glen." — "I suppose this 
is the road to Killin ? " (trying him on another tack.) — "That's an 
unco fat beast o' yours." — " Yes ; she is much too fat ; she is just from 
grass." — " Ah ! it 's a mere, I see ; it 's a gude beast to gang, I'se war- 
ran' you." — " Yes, yes ; it 's a very good pony." — " I selled just sic 
another at Doune fair, five years by-past : I warran' ye she 's a High- 
land-bred beast ? " — "I don't know , I bought her in Edinburgh." — 
" A-weel, a-weel, mony sic like gangs to the Edinburgh market frae the 
Highlands." — " Very likely ; she seems to have Highland blood in her." 

— " Ay, ay : would you be selling her? " — " No, I don't want to sell 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 397 

a less marked degree, we find the same characteristic caution 
and curiosity. In the sort of commerce of mutual information 
carried on, the stranger, unless he exercise very great caution 

her ; do you want to buy her ? " — " Na ! I was nae thinking- o' that : 
has she had na a foal ? " — " Not that I know of." — "I had a gude colt 
out of ours when I selled her. Ye 're na ganging to Doune the year ? ' ' 
— " No, I am going to Killin, and want to know how far it is." — " Ay, 
ye '11 be gaing to the sacraments there the morn ? " — " No, I don't be- 
long to your kirk." — "Ye '11 be an Episcopalian, then? " — "Or a 
Roman Catholic." — "Na, na ; ye 're nae Roman." — "And so it is 
twelve miles to Killin ? " (putting a leading question.) — " Na ; it 's nae 
just that." — " It 's ten, then, I suppose ? " — " Ye '11 be for cattle, then, 
for the Falkirk tryst ? " — " No ; I know nothing about cattle." — "I 
thocht ye 'd ha'e been just ane o' thae English drovers. Ye have nae 
siccan hills as this in your country ? " — " No, not so high." — " But 
ye '11 ha'e bonny farms ? " — " Yes, yes ; very good lands." — " Ye '11 
nae ha'e better farms than my Lord's at Dunira? " — " No, no ; Lord 
Melville has very fine farms." — "Now, there's a bonny bit land; 
there 's nae three days in the year there 's nae meat for beasts on it ; and 
it 's to let. Ye '11 be for a farm hereawa ? " — " No ; I am just looking 
at the country." — " And ye have nae business ? " — " No." — " Weel, 
that 's the easiest way." — " And this is the road to Killin ? " — " Will 
ye tak' some nuts? " (producing a handful he had just gathered.) — 
" No ; I cannot crack them." — "I suppose your teeth failing. Ha'e ye 
ony snuff? " — " Yes, yes ; here is a pinch for you." — " Na, na ; I 'm 
unco heavy on the pipe, ye see ; but I like a hair o' snuff ; just a hair," 
(touching the snuff with the end of his little finger, apparently to prolong 
time, and save the answer about the road a little longer, as he seemed to 
fear there were no more questions to ask. The snuff, however, came just 
in time to allow him to recall his ideas, which the nuts were near dis- 
persing.) " And ye '11 be from the low country ? " — " Yes ; you may 
know I am an Englishman by my tongue." — " Na ; our ain gentry 
speaks high English the now." — " Well, well, I am an Englishman, at 
any rate." — " And ye '11 be staying in London ? " — " Yes, yes." ■ — " I 
was ance at Smithfield mysel' wi' some beasts : it 's an unco place, Lon- 
don. And what's your name? asking your pardon." The name was 
given. " There 's a hantel o' that name i' the north. Yere father '11 
maybe be a Highlander? " — " Yes ; that is the reason why I like the 
Highlanders." — " Well (nearly thrown out), it 's a bonny country now, 
34 



398 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

indeed, is in danger of being the loser. Foi it 3 the char- 
acter of the common Scotch people, in this kind of barter, to 
take as much and give as little as they can. Not such, how- 
ever, the character of the common English. I found I could 
get from them as much information of a personal nature as 1 
pleased, and on the cheapest possible terms. The Englishman 
seems rather gratified than otherwise to have an opportunity 
of speaking about himself. He tells you what he is, and what 
he is doing, and what he intends doing, — gives a full account 
of his prospects in general, — and adds short notices of the con- 
dition and character of his relatives. As for you, the inquirer, 
you may, if you please, be communicative about yourself and 
your. concerns, and the Englishman will listen for a little ; but 
the information is not particularly wanted, — he has no curiosity 
to know anything about you. And this striking difference which 
obtains between the two peoples seem a fundamental one. The 
common Scot is naturally a more inquisitive, more curious be- 
ing, than the common Englishman : he asks many more ques- 
tions, and accumulates much larger hoards of fact. In circurr - 
stances equally unfavorable, he acquires, in consequence, more 
of the developing pabulum ; just as it is the nature of some seeds 

but it 's sail* cauld here in the winter. " — " And so it is six miles to 
Killin?" — "Ay, they ca' it sax." — "Scotch miles, I suppose?" — 
"Ay, ay ; auld miles." — "That is about twelve English?" — " Na, 
it '11 no be abune ten short miles " — (here we got on so fast, that I be 
gan to think I should be dismissed at last), — " but I never seed them 
measured. And ye '11 ha'e left your family at Comrie ? " — " No ; I am 
alone." — " They '11 be in the south, maybe ? " — " No ; I have no fam 
ily." — " And are ye no married ? " — " No." — " I'm thinking it 's 
time ? " — " So am I." — " Weel, weel, ye '11 ha'e the less fish." — 
" Yes, much less than in finding the way to Killin." — " 0, ay, ye '11 
excuse me ; but we countra folk speers muckle questions." — " Pretty 
well, I think." — " Weel, weel, ye '11 find it saft a bit in the hill ; but ye 
maun had wast, and it 's nae abune ten mile. A gude day." 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 399 

to attract a larger amount of moisture than others, and to shoot 
out their lobes and downward fibres, while huskier germs lie 
undeveloped amid the aridity of their enveloping matrices. 

But the broader foundations of the existing difference seem 
to lie rather in moral than in natural causes. They are to be 
found, I am strongly of opinion, in the very dissimilar religious 
history of the two countries. Religion, in its character as a 
serious intellectual exercise, was never brought down to the 
common English mind, in the way in which it once pervaded, 
and to a certain extent still saturates, the common mind of 
Scotland. Nor is the peculiar form of religion best known in 
England so well suited as that of the Scotch to awaken the 
popular intellect. Liturgies and ceremonies may constitute the 
vehicles of a sincere devotion ; but they have no tendency to 
exercise the thinking faculties ; their tendency bears rather the 
other way, — they constitute the ready-made channels, through 
which abstract, unideal sentiment flows without effort. The 
Arminianism, too, so common in the English Church, and so 
largely developed in at least one of the more influential and 
numerous bodies of English Dissenters, is a greatly less awak- 
ening system of doctrine than the Calvinism of Scotland. It 
does not lead the earnest mind into those abstruse recesses of 
thought to which the peeuliar Calvinistic doctrines form so 
inevitable a vestibule. The man who deems himself free is 
content simply to believe that he is so ; while he who regards 
himself as bound is sure to institute a narrow scrutiny into the 
nature of the chain that binds him ; and hence it is that Cal- 
vinism proves the best possible of all schoolmasters for teaching 
a religious people to think. I found no such peasant metaphy- 
sicians in England as those I have so often met in my own 
country, — m'en who, under the influence of earnest belief, had 
wrought their way, all unassisted by the philosopher, into some 



400 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

of the abstrusest questions of the schools. And yet, were I 
asked to illustrate by example the grand principle of the intel- 
lectual development of Scotland, it would be to the history of 
one of the self-taught geniuses of England, — John Bunyan, 
the inimitable Shakspeare of theological literature, — that I 
would refer. Had the tinker of Elstow continued to be 
throughout life what he was in his early youth, — a profane, 
irreligious man, — he would have lived and died an obscure 
and illiterate one. It was the wild turmoil of his religious con- 
victions that awakened his mental faculties. Had his convic- 
tions slept, the whole mind would have slept with them, and he 
would have remained intellectually what the great bulk of the 
common English still are; but, as the case happened, the tre- 
mendous blows dealt by revealed truth at the door of his con- 
science aroused the whole inner man; and the deep slumber 
of the faculties, reasoning and imaginative, was broken forever. 
In at least one respect, however, religion — if we view it in 
a purely secular aspect, and with exclusive reference to its 
effects on the present scene of things — was more essentially 
necessary to the Scotch as a nation than to their English 
neighbors. The Scottish character seems by no means so 
favorably constituted for working out the problem of civil lib- 
erty as that of the English. It possesses in a much less degree 
that innate spirit of independence which, in asserting a proper 
position for itself, sets consequences of a civil and economic 
cast at defiance. In the courage that meets an enemy face to 
face in the field, — that triumphs over the sense of danger and 
the fear of death, — that, when the worst comes to the worst, 
never estimates the antagonist strength, but stands firm and 
collected, however great the odds mustered against it, — no 
people in the world excel the Scotch. But in the political 
courage manifested in the subordinate species of warfare that 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 401 

has t:> be maintained, not with enemies that assail from with- 
out but with class interests that encroach from within, they 
stand by no means so high : they are calculating, cautious, 
timid. The man ready in the one sort of quarrel to lay down 
his life, is not at all prepared in the other to sacrifice his means 
of living. And these striking traits of the national character 
are broadly written in the history of the country. In perhaps 
no other instance was so poor and so limited a district main- 
tained intact against such formidable enemies for so many hun- 
dred years. The story so significantly told by the two Eoman 
walls is that of all the after history of Scotland, down to the 
union of the two crowns. But, on the other hand, Scotland 
has produced no true patriots, who were patriots only, — none, 
at least, whose object it was to elevate the mass of the people, 
and give to them the standing, in relation to the privileged 
classes, which it is their right to occupy. Fletcher of Saltoun, 
though, from the Grecian cast of his political notions, an appa- 
rent exception, was, notwithstanding, but a mere enthusiastic 
Scot of the common national type, who, while he would have 
made good the claims of his country against the world, would, 
as shown by his scheme of domestic slavery, have subjected 
one half his countrymen to the unrestrained despotism of the 
other half. It was religion alone that strengthened the charac- 
ter of the Scotch where it most needed strength, and enabled 
them to struggle against their native monarchs and the aris- 
tocracy of the country, backed by all the power of the State, for 
more than a hundred years. Save for the influence over them 
of the Unseen and the Eternal, the Englishman, in his struggle 
with Charles the First, would have found them useless allies , 
Leslie would never have crossed the Borders at the head of a 
determined army ; and the Parliament of England would have 
shared, in this century, the fate of the contemporary States- 
34* 



402 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

General of France. The devout Knox is the true representa- 
tive of those real patriots of Scotland who have toiled and 
suffered'to elevate the character and standing- of her common 
people ; and in the late Disruption may be seen how much and 
how readily her better men can sacrifice for principle's sake, 
when they deem their religion concerned. But apart from 
religious considerations, the Scotch affect a cheap and frugal 
patriotism, that achieves little and costs nothing. 

In the common English, on the contrary, there is much of 
that natural independence which the Scotchman wants ; and 
village Hampdens — men quite as ready to do battle in behalf 
of their civil rights with the lord of the manor as the Scot with 
a foreign enemy — are comparatively common characters. Nor 
is it merely in the history, institutions and literature, of the 
country, — in its great Charter, — its Petition of Right, — its 
Habeas Corpus Act, — its trial by jury, — in the story of its 
Hampdens, Russells, and Sidneys, or in the political writings 
of its Miltons, Harringtons, and Lockes, — that we recognize 
the embodiment of this great national trait. One may see it 
scarce less significantly stamped, in the course of a brief morn- 
ing's walk, on the face of the fields. There are in Scotland 
few of the pleasant styles and sequestered pathways open to 
the public, which form in England one of the most pleasing 
features of the agricultural provinces. The Scotch people, in 
those rural districts in which land is of most value, find them- 
selves shut out of their country. Their patriotism may expa- 
tiate as it best can on the dusty public road, for to the road 
they have still a claim ; but the pleasant hedgerows, the woods, 
and fields, and running streams, are all barred against them ; 
and so generally is this the case, that if they could by and by 
+ell that the Scotch had taken Scotland, just as their fathers 
used to te in joke, as a p'ece of intelligence, that " the Dutch 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 403 

had ta^en Holland," it v;ould be no joke at all, but, on the con- 
trary, a piece of most significant news, almost too good to be 
true. From encroachments of this character the independent 
spirit of the English people has preserved them. The right 
of old pathways has been jealously maintained. An English- 
man would peril his livelihood, any day, in behalf of a style 
that had existed in the times of his grandfather. And hence 
England, in its richest districts, with all its quiet pathways 
and pleasant green lanes, has been kept open to the English. 

There are, however, at least two causes in operation at the 
present time, that are militating against this independent spirit. 
One of these is the Whig poor-law ; the other, the tenant-at- 
will system, now become so general in England. Under the 
old poor-law, the English laborer in the rural districts indulged 
in a surly, and by no means either amiable or laudable, inde- 
pendence. The man who, when set aside from labor, or who, 
when employment could not be procured, could compel from 
his parish an allowance for his support, unclogged by the hor- 
rors of the modern workhouse, occupied essentially different 
ground from the man who, in similar circumstances, can but 
compel admission into a frightful prison. The exposures of 
journals such as the " Times " have been less successful in pro- 
ducing an influential reaction against the Union Bastiles, than 
in inspiring the poor with a thorough dread of them. A mod- 
ern workhouse in the vista forms but a dreary prospect ; and 
the independence of the English agricultural laborer is sinking 
under the frequent survey of it which his circumstances com- 
pel. Nor has the very general introduction of the tenant-at- 
will system been less influential in lowering the higher-toned 
and more manly independency of spirit of a better class of the 
Engt.ish people. One of the provisions of the Reform Bill has 
had me effect of sinking the tenantry of England into a state 



404 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

of vassalage and political subserviency without precedent in 
the country since the people acquired standing-room within the 
pak :f the constitution. It has been well remarked by Paley, 
that Lie more direct consequences of political innovation are 
often the least important, and that it is from the silent and 
unobserved operation of causes set at work for different pur- 
poses, that the greatest revolutions take their rise. In illus- 
tration of the remark, he adduces that provision in the Mutiny 
Act, introduced with but little perception of its vast importance, 
which, by making the standing army dependent on an annual 
grant of Parliament, has rendered the king's dissent to a law 
which has received the sanction of both houses too perilous a 
step to be advised, and has thus altered the whole framework 
and quality of the British constitution. He adduces, further, 
the arrangement, at first as inadequately estimated, which, by 
conferring on the crown the nomination to all employments in 
the public service, has well-nigh restored to the monarch, by 
the amount of patronage which it bestows, the power which 
the provision in the Mutiny Act had taken away. And thus 
the illustrations of the philosopher run on, — all of a kind 
suited to show that " in politics the most important and perma- 
nent effects have, for the most part, been incidental and unfore- 
seen." It is questionable, however, whether there be any of 
the adduced instances more striking than that furnished by 
this indirect consequence of the Reform Bill on the tenantry 
of England. The provision which conferred a vote on the 
tenant-at-will abrogated leases, and made the tiller of the soil 
a vassal. The farmer who precariously holds his farm from 
year to year cannot, of course, be expected to sink so much 
capital in the soil, in the hope of a distant and uncertain return, 
as the lessee certain of possession for a specified number of 
seasons ; bu . some capital he must sink in it. It is impossible, 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 4U5 

according to the modern system, or, indeed, any system of hus- 
bandry, that all the capital committed to the earth in winter 
and spring- should be resumed in the following summer and 
autumn. A considerable overplus must inevitably remain to 
be gathered up in future seasons ; and this overplus, in the 
case of the tenant-at-will, is virtually converted into a deposit 
lodged in the hands of the landlord, to secure the depositor's 
political subserviency and vassalage. Let him but once mani- 
fest a will and mind of his own, and vote in accordance 
with his convictions, contrary to the will of the landlord, and 
straightway the deposit, converted into a penalty, is forfeited 
for the offence. 

I spent a few fine days in revisiting the Silurian deposits of 
Dudley, and in again walking over the grounds of Hagley and 
the Leasowes. I visited also the Silurian patch at Walsall, 
which, more than one-half surrounded by the New Red Sand- 
stone, forms the advanced guard, or picket, of this system in 
England towards the east. It presents, however, over the 
entire tract of some six or eight square miles which it occu- 
pies, a flat, soil-covered surface, on which the geologist may 
walk for hours without catching a glimpse of the rock under- 
neath ; and it is only from the stone brought to the surface at 
sinkings made for lime,jand wrought after the manner of coal- 
pits, that he arrives at a knowledge of the deposits below. I 
picked up beside the mouth of a pit near the town of Walsall 
at least two very characteristic fossils of the system, — the 
Atrypa Affinis and the Catenipora Escharoides ; and saw that, 
notwithstanding the proximity of the Coal Measures, the rock, 
though mineralogically identical with the Carboniferous Lime- 
stone, cannot be regarded as belonging to that formation, which, 
with the Old Red Sandstone, is wholly wanting in the Dudley 
coal-field. The coal here rests on the Upper Silurian, just as 



406 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

the Lias of Cromartyshire rests on the Lower Old Red, or the 
Wealden of Moray on the Cornstone. On my way north, I 
quitted the train at Nantwich, to see the salt-works which have 
been carried on in that town for many years ; but I found them 
merely editions in miniature of the works at Droitwich. 1 
would fain also have visited the salt-mines of Cheshire, so 
famous for their beauty. They lay off my road, however ; 
and, somewhat in haste to get home, I did what I afterwards 
regretted — quitted England without seeing them. Before 
nightfall, after leaving Nantwich, I got on to Liverpool, and 
passed the night in a respectable temperance coffee-house, — 
one of the lodging-houses of that middle grade in which, in 
England, the traveller is sure to meet with a great many Dis- 
senters, and the Dissenter with a great many of his brethren ; 
and in which both, in consequence, are apt to regard the cause 
of Dissent as rather stronger in the country than it actually is. 
But the consideration of this somewhat curious subject I shall 
defer till the nex';, — my concluding chapter. 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 407 



CHAPTER XX. 

Dissent a Mid-formation Organism in England. — Church of Englandism 
strong among the Upper and Lower Classes : its Peculiar Principle of 
Strength among the Lower ; among the Upper. — The Church of Eng- 
land one of the strongest Institutions of the Country. — Puseyism, how- 
ever, a Canker-worm at its Root ; Partial Success of the Principle. — 
The Type of English Dissent essentially different from that of Scot- 
land ; the Causes of the Difference deep in the Diverse Character of 
the two Peoples. — Insulated Character of the Englishman productive 
of Independency. — Adhesive Character of the Scotch productive of 
Presbyterianism. — Attempts to legislate for the Scotch in Church 
Matters on an English Principle always unfortunate. — Erastianism ; 
essentially a different thing to the English Churchman from what it 
is to the Scot. — Reason why. — Independent Scotch Congregation in 
a Rural District. —Rarely well based ; and why. — Conclusion. 

When I first came among the English, I was impressed by 
the apparent strength of Dissent in the country. At least two 
out of every three Englishmen I met in the lodging-houses, 
and no inconsiderable proportion of the passengers by the rail- 
ways, so far as I could ascertain their denominations, were, I 
found, Dissenters. I had lodged in respectable second-class 
coffee-houses and inns : I had travelled on the rails by the 
second-class carriages : I had thus got fairly into a middle 
stratum of English society, and was not aware at the time 
that, like some of the geologic formations, it has its own pecu- 
liar organisms, essentially different, in the group, from those of 
either the stratum above or the stratum below. Dissent is a 
mid-formation organism in England ; whereas Church of Eng- 
landism more peculiarly belongs to the upper and lower strata. 
Church of Englandism puts up at the first-class inns, travels 



40y FIRST IMPRESSIONS Oi^ 

by the first-class carriages, possesses the titles, the large estates 
and the manor-houses, and enjoys, in short, the lion's share of 
the vested interests. And in the lower stratum it is also strong 
after a sort: there exists in its favor a powerful prejudice, 
capable of being directed to the accomplishment of purposes of 
either good or evil. 

Among the mid-stratum Dissent of England I found a 
marked preponderance of Independency, which, indeed, seems 
the true type of English Dissent in the middle walks; and 
shrewd, intelligent, thoroughly respectable men the English 
Independents are. But when I descended to a humbler order 
of lodging-houses, and got by this means among the lower 
English people, I lost sight of Independency altogether. The 
only form of Dissent I then encountered was Wesleyism, — in 
the New Connection, political, speculative, and not over sound 
in its theology, — in the Old, apparently much more quiet, 
more earnest, and more under the influence of religious feeling. 
The type of Dissent seems as decidedly Wesleyan among the 
humbler English, as it is Independent among the middle 
classes; nay, judging from what I saw, — and my observations, 
if necessarily not very numerous, were at least made at points 
widely apart, — I am inclined to believe that a preponderating 
share of the vital religion of the laborers and handicraftsmen 
of the English people is to be found comprised among the 
membership of this excellent body. And yet, after all, it takes 
up but comparatively a small portion of the lower population 
of the country. Among the great bulk of the humbler people, 
religion exists, not as a vitality, — not even as a speculative 
system, — but simply as an undefined hereditary prejudice, 
that looms large and uncertain in the gloom of darkened intel- 
lects. And, to the extent to which this prejudice is influential, 
it favors the stability of the Established Church. The class who 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 409 

entertain it evince a marked neglect of the Church's services, 
— give no heed to her teachings, — rarely enter her places of 
worship even, — nay, her right has been challenged to reckon 
on them as adherents at all. They have been described as a 
neutral party, that should be included neither in the census of 
Dissent nor of the Establishment. But to the Establishment 
they decidedly belong. They regard the National Church as 
theirs, — as a Church of which an Englishman may well be 
proud, and in which each one of them, some short time before 
he dies, is to become decent and devout. And there may be 
much political strength, be it remarked, in prejudices of this 
character. Protestantism in the Lord George Gordon mob? 
was but a prejudice, not a religion. These mobs, scarce less 
truly in history than as drawn by Dickens, were religious mobs 
without religion; but the prejudice was, notwithstanding, a 
strong political element, which, until a full half-century had 
worn it out of the English mind, rendered concession to the 
Papists unsafe. We see nearly the same phenomenon exhib- 
ited by the Orangemen of Ireland of the present day, — a class 
with whom Protestantism is a vigorous, influential principle, 
though it bears scarce any reference to a world to come ; and 
find, in like manner, the Episcopalian prejudice strong among 
the English masses broken loose from religion. 

Church of Englandism is peculiarly strong in the upper 
walks of English society. Like the old brazen statue, huge 
enough to hold a lighthouse in its hand, it strides across the 
busy current of middle English life, and plants its one colossal 
foot among the lower orders, and the other among the aristoc- 
racy. It undoubtedly possesses among the higher classes a 
double element of strength. It is strong, on the principle eulo- 
gized by Burke, from the union which it exhibits of high rank 
and the sacerdotal character. Religion developed in the Puri- 
35 



410 FIRST IMPRESSIO:- 6 OF 

tanic type, and existing as an energetic reformi.ig spirit, is 
quite as independent of riches and exalted station .n its minis- 
ters now as in the days of the apostles ; but to religion existing 
simply as a conservative influence, — and such is its character 
in the upper walks of English society, — wealth and title are 
powerful adjuncts. When the mere conservative clergyman 
has earls and dukes to address, he is considerably more influ- 
ential as a rector than as a curate, and as an archbishop than 
as a dean. The English hierarchy is fitted to the English 
aristocracy. And, further, the Church of England, as an 
Establishment, derives no little strength through an element 
from which the Establishment of Scotland, owing in part to its 
inferior wealth, but much more to the very different genius of 
the Scotch people, derives only weakness, — it is strong in its 
secular and Erastian character. There is scarce an aristocratic 
interest in the country, Whig or Tory, with which it is not 
intertwined, nor a great family that has not a large money 
stake involved in its support. Like a stately tree that has sent 
its roots deep into the joints and crannies of a rock, and that 
cannot be uprooted without first tearing open with levers and 
wedges the enclosing granite, it would seem as if the aristoc- 
racy would require to be shaken and displaced by revolution 
ere, in the natural course of things, the English Establishment 
could come down. The Church of England is, at the present 
moment, one of the strongest institutions of the country. 

There is, however, a canker-worm at its root. The revival 
of the High Church element, in even its more modified form, 
bodes it no good; while in the extreme Puseyite type it is 
fraught with danger. In the conversions to Popery to which 
the revival has led, the amount of damage done to the Estab- 
lishment is obvious. We see it robbed of some of its more ear- 
nest, energetic men. These, however, form merely a few chips 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 411 

and fragments struck off the edifice. But the eating canker, 
introduced by the principle into its very heart, threatens results 
of a greatly more perilous cast, — results none the less formi- 
dable from the circumstance that the mischief inflicted is of too 
covert a nature to be exactly estimated. If the axe of an en- 
en y has assailed the supporting posts of the hut of the Indian, 
he can at once calculate on the extent of the damage received ; 
but the ravages of the white ants, that scoop out the body of 
the wood, leaving merely a thin outside film, elude calculation, 
and he trembles lest the first hurricane that arises should bury 
him in the ruins of the weakened structure. This much, at 
least, is obvious, — the position in which the revived influence 
has placed the English Church is one of antagonism to the tend- 
encies of the age; and equally certain it is that institutions 
waste away, like ice-flows stranded in thaw-swollen rivers, 
when the general current of the time has set in against them. 
The present admiration of the mediaeval cannot be other than 
a mere transitory freak of fashion. The shadow on the great 
dial of human destiny will not move backward : vassalage and 
serfship will not return. There is too wide a diffusion of the 
morning light for bat-eyed superstition ; and the light is that 
of the morning, — not of the close of day. Science will con- 
tinue to extend the limits of her empire, and to increase the 
numbers of her adherents, unscared by any spectre of the de- 
funct scholastic philosophy which Oxford may evoke from the 
abyss. Nay, the goblin, like those spirits that used to carry 
away with them, in their retreat, whole sides of houses, will be 
formidable, in the end, to but the ecclesiastical institution in 
which it has been raised. It is worthy of notice, too, that 
though Popery and Puritanism — the grand antagonistic prin- 
ciples of church history for at least the last four centuries — 
are both possessed of great inherent power, the true analogue 



412 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

of modem Puseyism proved but a weakling, e=:en when at its 
best : it was found not to possess inherent power. The Can- 
terburianism of the times of Charles the First did that hapless 
monarch much harm. But while many a gallant principle 
fought for him in the subsequent struggle, from the old chival- 
rous honor and devoted loyalty of the English gentleman, down 
to even the poetry of the playhouse and the esprit du corps of 
the green-room, we find in the thick of the conflict scarce any 
trace of the religion of Laud. It resembled the mere scarlet 
rag that at the Spanish festival irritates the bull, but is of no 
after use in the combat. It is further deserving of remark, that 
an English Church reformed in its legislative and judicial 
framework to the very heart's wish of the Puseyite, would not 
be greatly more suited to the genius of the English people than 
in that existing state of the institution over which the Puseyite 
sighs. To no one circumstance is the Church more indebted 
for its preservation than to the suppression of that Court of 
Convocation which Puseyism is so anxious to restore. The 
General Assemblies and Synods of Presbyterian Scotland form, 
from their great admixture of the lay element, ecclesiastical 
parliaments that represent the people ; and their meetings add 
immensely to the popular interest in the Churches to which 
they belong ; but the Convocation was a purely sacerdotal court. 
It formed a mere clerical erection, as little representative in its 
character as the Star Chamber of Charles. It was suppressed 
just as it was becoming thoroughly alien to the English spirit; 
and its restoration at the present time would be one of the 
greatest calamities that could befall the English Establishment. 
Of the partial successes of Puseyism I cannot speak from 
direct observation. There are cases, however, in which it 
seems to have served to some extent the ends which it was 
resuscitated to accomplish ; — in one class of instances, through 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 413 

the support lent it by a favoring aristocracy, — in another class, 
through the appliance of means more exclusively its own. 
And, at the risk of being somewhat tedious, I shall present the 
reader with a specimen of each. 

It has been told me by an intelligent friend, who resided for 
some time in a rich district in one of the midland counties, in 
which the land for many miles round is parcelled out among 
some three or four titled proprietors, that he found Protestant 
Dissent wholly crushed in the locality, — its sturdier adherents 
cast out, — its weaker ones detached from their old commun- 
ions, and brought within the pale of the Establishment, — and 
a showy if not very earnest Puseyism reigning absolute. The 
change had been mainly brought about, he ascertained, by the 
female members of the great landholding families. The ludies 
of the manors had been vastly more active than their lords, 
with whose Conservative leanings, however, the servile politics 
of Puseyism agreed well. Charities to the poor of the district 
had been extensively doled out on the old non-compulsory 
scheme; but regular attendance at the parish church, or the 
chapel attached to the mansion-house, was rendered all-essen- 
tial in constituting a claim : the pauper who absented himself 
might, if he pleased, fall back on the workhouse and crush 
bones. Schools had been erected in which the rising genera- 
tion might be at once shown the excellence and taught the 
trick of implicit submission to authority ; and the pupils who 
attended school had to attend church also, as a matter of 
course. Even their parents had been successfully hounded out. 
Lords of the manor have no little power in England where their 
tenants are tenants-at-will, and where almost every cottage of 
the villages on their lands is their own property. Obstinate 
Dissenters found the controversy speedily settled by their re- 
moval from ;he scene of it ; while the less stubborn learned in 
35* 



414 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

time to grope their way to the parish church. Even the itin- 
erant preacher now finds himself barred out of districts in 
which he could draw around him considerable audiences only 
a few years ago. There are eyes on his old hearers, and they 
keep out of ear-shot of his doctrine. And this state of things 
obtains in localities in which the clergy, though essentially 
Puseyite, are by no means so overburdened by earnestness as 
to be in danger of precipitating themselves on Rome. I have 
heard of a whole parish brought out by such means to listen to 
a zealous sprig of High Churchism who preached to them with 
a broken face, — the result of an accident which he had met at 
a fox-hunt a few days before. 

This, however, is not a safe, nor can it be an enduring tri- 
umph. To use Cowper's figure, the bow forced into too violent 
a curve will scarce fail to leap into its " first position with a 
spring." The reaction in English society on the restraint of 
the times of Cromwell, which so marked the reign of Charles 
the Second, will be but faintly typical of the reaction destined 
to take place in these districts. It is according to the unvary- 
ing principles of human nature, that the bitterest enemies of 
High Churchism and a High Church aristocracy England ever 
produced should be reared at the Puseyite schools and churches, 
which mere tyrant compulsion has thus served to fill. In the 
other class of cases in which the revived religion has triumphed, 
its successes have been of a more solid and less perilous char- 
acter. I have been informed by a friend resident in one of the 
busier English towns, that by far the most influential and 
nourishing congregation of the place is a Puseyite one. Some 
eight or ten years ago it had been genteelly Evangelistic ; but, 
without becoi aing less earnest, it had got fairly afloat on the 
rising tide of revived Anglo-Catholicism, and had adopted both 
the doctrines and the po icy of the Puseyite party. It has its 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 415 

energetic, active staff of visiting ladies, who recommend them- 
selves to the poor of the district by their gratuitous labors and 
their cha:ities. Its clergyman, too, is a laborious, devoted man, 
frequent in his visits to families saddened by bereavement or 
afflicted by disease ; and the congregation have their mission- 
ary besides, — a person of similar character, — to second and 
multiply in the same walk the endeavors of his superior. 
Whatever Moderatism and its congeners may think of the 
aggressive system of Dr. Chalmers, Puseyism at least does 
not deem it either unimportant or impracticable. The revived 
principle is, besides, found supplementing the system with 
expedients of its own. The Whig poor-law adds, as has been 
shown, to Puseyite influence ; and Puseyism adds to that influ- 
ence still more, by denouncing the Whig poor-law. Is a pauper 
in the locality aggrieved through the neglect or cruelty of some 
insolent official ? — Puseyism in this congregation takes up his 
cause and fights his battle ; and hence great popularity among 
the poorer classes, and pews crowded with them to the doors ; 
while Evangelistic clergymen of the Establishment, in the 
same town, have to preach to nearly empty galleries, and the 
Dissenters of the place are fain to content themselves with 
retaining unshortened, and hardly that, their old rolls of mem- 
bership. The only aggressive, increscent power in the locality 
is Puseyism. Nor is it found, as in the case of the Popish 
converts, precipitating itself on Kome. Much must depend, in 
matters of this kind, on the peculiar character of the leading 
minds of a congregation. Mr. Newman has become a zealous 
Papist ; but Dr. Pusey, on the other hand, is still a member of 
the Church of England ; and it is a well-known historical fact, 
that Laud, with all his Popish leanings, refused a cardinal's 
hat, and died an English bisuop. There are minds that, like 
Mahomet's coffin, can rest in a middle region, surrounded by 



416 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

balancing attractions, — that can dwell on premises without 
passing to conclusions, — and thus resist the gravitating influ- 
ence ; and in the English Establishment the balancing attrac- 
tions are many and powerful. Hence the midwa}' position 
occupied by the great bulk of the English Puseyites, and the 
bad metaphysics with which they bemuse themselves, in justi- 
fying their sudden halt at what should be so palpable a point 
of progress. As has been quaintly remarked by an English 
clergyman on the opposite side of the Church, " they set out 
for Rome, but stopped short on reaching Appii Forum, and got 
drunk at the Three Taverns." 

But enough, and, I am afraid, more than enough, of Pusey- 
ism. It forms, however, one of the most remarkable features 
of the domestic history of England in the present day ; and 
seems destined powerfully to affect, in the future, the condition 
and standing of the great ecclesiastical institution of the coun- 
try. And it is worth while bestowing a little attention on a 
phenomenon which the future chronicler may have to record as 
by far the most influential among various causes which led to 
the downfall of the English Establishment. It may yet come 
to be written as history, that this great and powerful institution, 
when casting about for an element of strength, instead of avail- 
ing herself of the Evangelism of her first Reformers, — the 
only form of religion fitted to keep ahead of the human mind 
in its forward movement, — attached herself to that old sta- 
tionary religion of resuscitated tradition, idle ceremony, and 
false science, which her reformers had repudiated ; and that, 
unable, in consequence, to prosecute the onward voyage, the 
great tidal wave of advancing civilization bore her down, and 
she foundered at anchor. 

I was a good deal impressed by the marked difference 
which obtains between the types of English and Scotch Dis- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 417 

sent, They indicate, I am of opinion, the very opposite charac- 
ters of the two countries. No form of Dissent ever nourished 
in Scotland that was not of the Presbyterian type. The 
Relief body, — the various branches of the Secession, — the 
Free Church, — the followers of Richard Cameron, — are all 
Presbyterian. Wesleyism thrives but indifferently; — Inde- 
pendency, save where sustained by the superior talents of its 
preachers in large towns, where the character of the people 
has become more cosmopolitan and less peculiarly Scotch than 
in the smaller towns and the country, gets on at least no bet- 
ter; — Episcopacy, with fashion, title and great wealth, on its 
side, scarce numbers in its ranks the one-sixtieth part of the 
Scotch people. Presbyterianism, and that alone, is the true 
national type of the religion of Scotland. In England, on the 
other hand, there are two distinct national types, — the Episco- 
palian and the Independent; and both flourish to the exclusion 
of almost every other. Wesleyism also flourishes ; but Wes- 
leyism may be properly regarded as an ofT-shoot of Episcopacy. 
In the New Connection there is a palpable development of the 
Independent spirit ; but in that genuine Wesleyism established 
by Wesley, which gives its preachers at will to its people, and 
removes them at pleasure, and which possesses authority, order, 
and union, without popular representation, the spirit and princi- 
ple is decidedly Episcopalian. It may be worth while exam- 
ining into a few of the more prominent causes in which these 
ecclesiastical peculiarities of the two countries have in a great, 
measure originated, altogether independently of the^'ztf divinum 
arguments of the theologian, or of the influences which these 
exercise. 

There obtains a marked difference in one important respect be 
tween English and Scotch character. The Englishman stands 
out more separate aid apart as an individual ; the Scotch- 



418 FIRST TIPRESSIONS OF 

man '.s more nixed up, through the force of his sympathies, 
with the community to which he belongs. The Englishman's 
house is his castle, and he glories in its being such. England 
is a country studded over with innumerable detached fortalices, 
each one furnished with its own sturdy independent castellan, 
ready, no doubt, to join, for purposes of mutual defence, with 
his brother castellans, but not greatly drawn towards them by 
the operation of any internal sympathy. Englishmen some- 
what resemble, in this respect, particles of matter lying outside 
the sphere of the attractive influences, and included within that 
of the repulsive ones. The population exists as separate parts, 
Uke loose grains of sand in a heap, — not in one solid mass, 
like agglutinated grains of the same sand consolidated into 
a piece of freestone. Nothing struck my Scotch eyes, in the 
rural districts, as more unwonted and peculiar than the state of 
separatism which neighbors of a class that in Scotland would 
be on the most intimate terms maintain with respect to each 
other. I have seen, in instances not a few, the whole farmers 
of a Scotch rural parish forming, with their families, one 
unbroken circle of acquaintance, all on visiting terms, and 
holding their not unfrequent tea-parties together, and all know- 
ing much of one another's history and prospects. And no 
Scotchman resident in the parish, however humble, — whether 
hind or laborer, — but knew, I have found, who lived in each 
farm-house, and was acquainted in some degree with at least 
the more palpable concerns of its inmates. Now, no such 
sociableness appears to exist in the rural parishes of England ; 
and neighbor seems to know scarce anything of neighbor. 

In the " Essay on National Character," we find Hume 

remarking a different phase of the same phenomenon, and 

assigning a reason far it. " We may often observe," he says, 

a wonderful mixture of manners and characters in the same 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 419 

nation, speaking the same language, and subject to the same 
government ; and in this particular the English are the most 
remarkab'e of any people that perhaps ever were in the world. 
Nor is this to be ascribed to the mutability and uncertainty of 
their climate, or to any other physical causes, since all these 
causes take place in the neighboring country of Scotland, 
without having the same effect. Where the government of a 
nation is altogether republican, it is apt to beget a peculiar set 
of manners. Where it is altogether monarchical, it is more 
apt to have the same effect, — the imitation of superiors spread- 
ing the national manners faster among the people. If the 
governing part of a state consists altogether of merchants, as 
in Holland, their uniform way of life will fix the character. If 
it consists chiefly of nobles and landed gentry, like Germany, 
France, and Spain, the same effect follows. The genius of a 
particular sect or religion is also apt to mould the manners of a 
people. But the English government is a mixture of monarchy, 
aristocracy, and democracy. The people in authority are com- 
posed of gentry and merchants. All sorts of religion are to be 
found among them ; and the great liberty and independency 
which every man enjoys allows him to display the manners 
peculiar to him. Hence the English, of any people in the 
universe, have the least of a national character, unless this 
very singularity may pass for such." Such is the estimate of 
the philosopher ; and it seems but natural that, in a country in 
which the people are so very various in character, the extreme 
diversity of their tastes, feelings, and opinions, should fix them 
rather within the sphere of the repulsive than of the attractive 
influences. 

Certain it is that the multitudinous sources of character in 
England do not merge into one great stream : the runnels keep 
apart, each pursuing its own separate course; and hence, appar- 



420 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

ently, one grand cause of the strange state of separatism which 
appears among the people. It seems scarce possible to imagine 
a fitter soil, than that furnished by a characteristic so peculiar, 
for the growth of an Independent form of Christianity. The 
influences of Evangelism are attractive in their nature : they 
form the social prayer-meeting, the congregation, the national 
Church, and, spreading outwards and onwards, embrace next 
the Church catholic and universal, and then the whole human 
family. And unquestionably in the Evangelism of Indepen- 
dency, as in Evangelism in every other form, there is much of 
this attractive influence. But it is the distinctive peculiarity 
of its structure that it insulates every congregation, as forming 
of itself a complete Christian Church, independent in its laws, 
and not accountable to any ecclesiastical body for its beliefs ; 
and this peculiarity finds in the English mind the most suitable 
soil possible for its growth. The country of insulated men is 
the best fitted to be also the country of insulated Churches. 
Even the Episcopacy of the national Church has assumed in 
many districts a decidedly Independent type. The congrega- 
tions exist as separate, detached communities, — here Puseyite, 
there Evangelical, — High Church in one parish, Rationalistic 
in another ; and, practically at least, no general scheme of 
government or of discipline binds them into one. 

But while the Englishman is thus detached and solitary, the 
Scotchman is mixed up, by the force of his sympathies, with 
the community to which he belongs. He is a minute portion 
of a great aggregate, which he always realizes to himself in its 
aggregate character. And this peculiarity we find embodied 
in our proverbs and songs, and curiously portrayed, in its more 
blamable or more ludicrous manifestations, in the works of 
the English satirists. "Most Scotchmen," said Johnson, in 
aimsion to the Ossianic controversy, " love Scotland betti ' 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 421 

than truth, and almost all of them love it better than inquiry." 
" You are almost the only instance of a Scotchman that I have 
known," we find him saying, on another occasion, to Boswell, 
" who did not at every other sentence bring in some other 
Scotchman." — "One grand element in the success of Scotch- 
men in London," he yet again remarks, " is their nationality. 
Whatever any one Scotchman does, there are five hundred 
more prepared to applaud. I have been asked by a Scotch- 
man to recommend to a place of trust a man in whom he had 
no other interest than simply that he was a countryman." — 
"'Your Grace kens we Scotch are clannish bodies,'" says 
Mrs. Glass, in the " Heart of Mid Lothian," to the Duke of 
Argyll. " ' So much the better for us,' " replies the Duke, 
" 'and the worse for those who meddle with us.' " — " Perhaps," 
remarks Sir Walter, in his own person, in the same work, 
"one ought to be actually a Scotchman, to conceive how 
ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situation, the 
Scotch feel the mutual connection with each other, as natives 
of the same country." But it may seem needless to multiply 
illustrations of a peculiarity so generally recognized. The 
gregariousness of the Scotch, — " Highlanders ! shoulder to 
shoulder," — the abstract coherency of the people as a nation, 
— their peculiar pride in the history of their country, — their 
strong- exhilarating associations with battle-fields on which the 
conflict terminated more than six hundred years ago, — their 
enthusiastic regard for the memory of heroes many centuries 
departed, who fought and bled in the national behalf, — are 
all well-known manifestations of a prominent national trait. 
Unlike the English, the Scotch form, as a people, not a heap 
of detached particles, but a mass of aggregated ones ; and 
hence, since at least the days of Knox, Scotland has formed 
one of th- most favorable soils for the growth of Protestantism, 
36 



422 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

in a Fresbyterian type, which the world has yet seen. The 
insulating bias of the English character leads to the formation 
of insulated Churches ; while this aggregate peculiarity of the 
Scottish character has a tendency at least equally direct to bind 
its congregations together into one grand Church, with the 
area, not of a single building, but of the whole kingdom, for 
its platform. It is not uninstructive to mark, in the national 
history, how thoroughly and soon the idea of Presbyterianism 
recommended itself to the popular mind in Scotland. Presby- 
terianism found a soil ready prepared for it in the national 
predilection ; and its paramount idea as a form of ecclesiasti- 
cal government seemed the one natural idea in the circum- 
stances. An Englishman might have thought of gathering 
together a few neighbors, and making a Church of them ; the 
Scotchman at once determined on making a Church of all 
Scotland. 

It seems necessary to the right understanding of the leading 
ecclesiastical questions of Scotch and English history, that 
these fundamental peculiarities of the two countries should be 
correctly appreciated. The attempt to establish a Scottish 
Church on an English principle filled an entire country with 
persecution and suffering, and proved but an abortive attempt, 
after all. And a nearly similar transaction in our own times 
has dealt to the cause of ecclesiastical Establishments in Brit- 
ain by far the severest blow it has ever yet sustained. What 
was perhaps the strongest of the three great religious Estab- 
lishments of the empire, has become, in at least an equal 
degree, the weakest ; and a weak State Church placed in 
the midst of a polemical people, is weakness very perilously 
posted. 

In no respect did the national Churches of England and 
Scotland differ more, as originally established, — the one at the 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 423 

Reformation and Restoration, the other at the Reformation and 
Revolution, — than in the place and the degree of power which 
they assigned to the civil magistrate. The Scottish Church 
gave up to his control all her goods and chattels, and the per- 
sons of her members, but allowed him no voice in ecclesiastical 
matters ; fully recognizing, however, as an obvious principle 
of adjustment, that when their decisions chanced to clash in 
any case, the civil magistrate should preserve his powers as 
intact over the temporalities involved, as the Church over the 
spiritualities. The magistrate maintained his paramount place 
in his own province, and disposed at will, in every case of col- 
lision, of whatever the State had given to the Church, — 
lands, houses, or money; while the Church, on the other hand, 
maintained in her own peculiar field her independence entire, 
and exercised uncontrolled those inherent powers which the 
State had not conferred upon her. She wielded in the purely 
ecclesiastical field a sovereign authority ; but, like that of the 
British monarch, it was authority subject to a stringent check : 
the civil magistrate could, when he willed, stop the supplies. 
In England, on the contrary, it was deemed unnecessary to pre- 
serve any such nice balance of civil and ecclesiastical power. 
The monarch, in his magisterial capacity, assumed absolute 
supremacy in all cases, spiritual as well as temporal ; and the 
English Church, satisfied that it should be so, embodied the 
principle in the Articles, which all her clergy are necessitated 
to subscribe. So essentially different was the genius of the 
two countries, that the claim on the part of the civil magis- 
trate which convulsed Scotland for more than a hundred years, 
to be ultimately rejected at the Revolution, was recognized and 
admitted in England at once and without struggle. 

The necessary effects of this ecclesiastical supremacy on the 
part of the sovereign are of a kind easily estimated. One has 



424 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

but to observe iU workings, and then try it by its fruits. That 
there exists no discipline in the Anglican Church, is an inevita- 
ble consequence of the paramount place which her standards 
assign to the civil magistrate. For it is of the nature of civil 
law that it will not bear — let men frame its requirements and 
penalties as they may — against what happen for the time to 
be the gentlemanly vices. If hard drinking chance to be fashi- 
onable, as fashionable it has been, no one is ever punished for 
hard drinking. A gentleman may get drunk with impunity at 
a chief magistrate's table, and have the chief magistrate's com- 
panionship in the debauch, to set him all the more at his ease. 
In like manner, if swearing chance to be fashionable, as fash- 
ionable it has been, even grave magistrates learn to swear, and 
no one is ever fined for dropping an oath. Exactly the same 
principle applies to the licentious vices : there are stringent 
laws in the statute-book against bastardy; but who ever saw 
them enforced to the detriment of a magistrate or a man of 
fortune ? And it is by no means in exclusively a corrupt state 
of the courts of law that this principle prevails : it obtains 
also in their ordinary efficient condition, in which they protect 
society against the swindler and the felon, and do justice be- 
tween man and man. It is of their nature as civil courts, — 
not a consequence of any extraordinary corruption, — that they 
will not bear against the gentlemanly vices ; and it is equally 
of their nature, too, in a country such as Britain, in which the 
influence of the toleration laws has been directing for ages the 
course of public opinion, that they should be thoroughly indif 
ferent to the varieties of religious belief. Unless the heresiarch 
be an indecent atheist, who insults society and blasphemes God, 
he is quite as good a subject, in the eye of the law, as the ortho- 
dox assertor of the national creed. 

Now, the magistrate does not relinquish this indifferency to 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 425 

mere matters of doctrine, ana this leniency with regard to the 
genteeler offences, by being made supreme in ecclesiastical 
matters. On the contrary, he brings them with him into the 
ecclesiastical court, where he decides in the name of the sov- 
ereign ; and the clergyman, whom he tries in his character as 
such, is quite as safe, if his vices be but of the gentlemanly 
cast, or his offences merely offences of creed, as if he were 
simply a layman. Hence the unvarying character of decisions 
by the English judges in Church cases. Is an appeal carried 
to the civil magistrate by a clergyman deprived for drunken- 
ness ? — the civil magistrate finds, as in a late instance, that 
the appellant is, in the main, a person of kindly dispositions 
and a good heart, and so restores him to his office. Is an 
appeal carried by a clergyman deprived for licentiousness 
and common swearing? — the magistrate concludes that there 
would be no justice in robbing a person of his bread for mere 
peccadilloes of so harmless a character, and so restores him to 
his office. Is an appeal carried by a clergyman deposed for 
simony ? — the civil magistrate finds that a man is not to be 
cut off from his own living for having sold some two or three 
others, and so restores him to his office. Is a clergyman a fre- 
quenter, on his own confession in open court, of houses of bad 
fame ? — What of that ? What civil magistrate could be so 
recklessly severe as to divest a highly connected young man, 
for so slight an offence, of thirteen hundred a-year? As for 
mere affairs of doctrine, they are, of course, slighter matters 
still ! Let the Socinian teach undisturbed in this parish 
church, and the Puseyite in that, — let the Arminian dis- 
course yonder, and the Calvinist here, — the civil magistral 
in the British empire is toleration personified, and casts his 
shield over them all. And such, in its workings, is that flagrant 
dread and abhorrence of the Evangelistic Scotch, Erastianism. 
36=* 



426 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

It is impossible, in the nature of things, that it can coexist with 
discipline ; for it is inherent and constitutional to it to substi- 
tute f:r the law of the New Testament the indifferency of the 
civil magistrate to mere theological distinctions, and his sym- 
pathy with the gentlemanly vices. 

But whLe such seems to be the real character of this Eras- 
tian principle, the Scotch Presbyterian who judges the devout 
English Episcopalian in reference to it by his own moral stand- 
ard, and the devout English Episcopalian who decides respect- 
ing the Presbyterian Scot with regard to it by his own peculiar 
feelings, may be both a good deal in error. In order to arrive 
at a just conclusion in either case, it is necessary to take into 
account the very opposite position and character of the parties, 
not only as the members of dissimilar Churches, but also as 
the inhabitants of different countries. That adhesive coher- 
ency of character in the Presbyterian Scot, which so thoroughly 
identifies him with his country, and makes the entire of his 
Church emphatically his, gives to the Erastian principle a 
degree of atrocity, in his estimate, which, to the insulated Eng- 
lish Episcopalian, practically an Independent in his feelings, 
and deeply interested in only his own congregation, it can- 
not possess. A John Newton at Olney may feel grieved as a 
Christian that Mr. Scott, the neighboring clergyman of Weston- 
Underwood, should be a rank Socinian, just in the way a 
devout Independent minister in one of the chapels of London 
may feel grieved as a Christian that there should be a Unita- 
rian minister teaching what he deems deadly error in another 
of the city chapels half a street away. But neither John Newton 
nor the Independent feel aggrieved in conscience by the fact : 
enough for them that they are permitted to walk, undisturbed, 
their round of ministerial duty, each in his own narrow sphere. 
The one, as ? a insulated Englishman and an Independent, is 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 427 

i :e leading member of a little congregational state, and all con- 
gregations besides are mere foreign states, with whose internal 
government he has nothing to do. The other, as an insulated 
Englishman, and as holding in an unrepresentative slumbrous 
despotism a subordinate command, which resolves itself practi- 
cally, as certainly as in the case of th3 Independent, into a 
sort of leading membership in a detached congregational state, 
feels himself as entirely cut off from the right or duty of inter- 
ference with his neighbors. And so long as the Erastian 
decision, unequivocally legalized by statute, fails to press upon 
him individually, or to operate injuriously on his charge, he 
deems it a comparatively light grievance : it affects a foreign 
state, — not the state that is emphatically his. But not such 
the estimate or the feelings of the Presbyterian Scot. He is 
not merely the member of a congregation, but also that of a 
united, coherent Church, coextensive with his country, and whose 
government is representative. There is not a congregation 
within the pale of the general body in which he has not a 
direct interest, and with regard to which he may not have an 
imperative duty to perform. He has an extended line to 
defend from encroachment and aggression ; and he feels that at 
whatever point the civil magistrate threatens to carry in the 
contamination which, when he assumes the ecclesiastical, it is 
his nature to scatter around him, he must be determinedly 
resisted, at whatever expense. Erastianism to the Scot and the 
Presbyterian is thus an essentially different thing from what it 
is to the Episcopalian and the Englishman. It is a sort of iron 
boot to both ; but, so far at least as feeling is concerned, it is 
around the vital limb of the Scotchman that it is made to 
tighten, while in the case of the Englishman it is wedged 
round merely a wooden leg. 

The errors committea by the government of the country, in 



428 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 

legislating for Scotland in matters of religion as if it were not 
a separate nation, possessed of a distinct and strongly-marked 
character :>f its own, but a mere province of England, have led 
invariably to disaster and suffering. Exactly the same kind 
of mistakes, however, when dissociated from the power of 
the State, have terminated in results of rather an amusing 
than serious character. In a country district or small town 
in Scotland, in which the Presbyterian clergy were of the unpop- 
ular Moderate type, I have seen an Independent meeting- 
house ge . into a flourishing condition ; its list of members 
would grratly lengthen, and its pews fill ; and, judging from 
appearances on which in England it would be quite safe to calcu- 
late, one might deem it fairly established. The Independent 
preacher in such cases would be found to be a good energetic 
man of the Evangelistic school ; and his earnest evangelism 
would thus succeed in carrying it over the mere Presbyterian 
predilection of the people. The true Scotch feeling, however, 
would be lying latent at bottom all the while, and constitut- 
ing a most precarious foundation for the welfare of the Inde- 
pendent meeting-house. And when in some neighboring 
Presbyterian church an earnest Evangelistic minister came to 
be settled, the predilection would at once begin to tell : the 
Independent congregation would commence gradually to break 
up and dissipate, until at length but a mere skeleton would 
remain. The Independent minister would have but one point 
of attraction to present to the people, — his Evangelism ; where- 
as the Presbyterian would be found to have two, — his Evan- 
gelism and his Presbyterianism also ; and the double power, like 
that of a double magnet, would carry it over the single one. 
Some of my readers must remember the unlucky dispute into 
which the editor of a London periodical, representative of Eng- 
ish Independency, entered about a twelvemonth after the Dis- 



ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 429 

ruD'i -n, with the Free Church. It hinged entirely, though I 
dare cay the English editor did not know it, on the one versus 
the two attractive points. An Independent chapel had been 
erected in the north of Scotland in a Moderate district ; and 
Evangelism, its one attractive point, had acquired for it a con- 
gregation. But through that strange revolution in the course 
of affairs which terminated in the Disruption, the place got a 
church that was at once Evangelistic and Presbyterian; and 
the church with the two points of attraction mightily thinned 
the congregation of the church that had but one. The deserted 
minister naturally enough got angry and unreasonable ; and 
the Congregationalist editor, through the force of sympathy, 
got angry and somewhat unreasonable too. But had the latter 
seen the matter as it really stood, he would have kept his tem- 
per. The cause lay deep in the long-derived character of the 
Scotch ; and it was a cause as independent of either Congre- 
gationalism or the Free Church, as that peculiarity in the 
soil and climate of an African island which makes exactly the 
same kind of grapes produce Madeira in its vineyards, that in 
the vineyards of Portugal produce Sherry. 

After a stay of rather more than two months in England, I 
took my passage in one of the Liverpool steamers for Glasgow, 
and in somewhat less than twenty-four hours after, was seated 
at my own fireside, within half a mile of the ancient Palace 
of Holyrood. I had seen much less of the English and their 
country than I had hoped and proposed to see. I had left 
the Chalk, the Wealden, and the London Clay unexplored, 
and many an interesting 'ocality associated with the literature of 
the country unvisited. But I had had much bad weather, 
and much indifferent health ; I had, besides, newspaper article- 
writing to the extent of at least a volume, to engage me in dull 
solitary rooms, when the pitiless rain was dropping heavily 



430 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND, ETC. 

from the eaves outside. And so, if my journey, like that of 
Obidah, the son of Abensina, has in its discrepancies between 
expectation and realization, promise and performance, resem- 
bled the great journey of life, I trust to be not very severely 
dealt with by the reader who has accompanied me this far, 
and to whom I have striven to communicate, as fairly as I 
have been able, and as fully as circumstances have permitted, 
my First Impressions of England and its Peop e. 



THE END. 



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OTTO'S POPULAR CYCLOPEDIA OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE. 

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HISTORY OF PALESTINE. 

With the Geography and Natural History of the Country, the Customs and Institu- 
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CHAMBERS'S CYCLOPEDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

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CHAMBERS'S REPOSITORY OF INSTRUCTIVE AND AMUSING PAPERS. 
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GOULD AND LINCOLN, 

59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, 

Would call particular attention to the following valuable woixs described 
in their Catalogue of Publications, viz. : 

Hugh Miller's "Works. 

Payne's Works. Walker's Works. Miall's "Works. Bungener's Work. 

Animal of Scientific Discovery. Knight's Knowledge is Power. 

Krummaeher's Suffering Saviour, 

Banvard's Anaericau Histories. The Aimwell Stories. 

Newcomb's "Works. Tweedie's Works. Chambers's Works. Harris 5 "Works. 

Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature. 

Mrs. Knight's Life of Montgomery. Kitto's History of Palestin 

Wheewell's "Work. "Wayland's Works. Agassiz's "Works. 




*.r.'sjyr/-r*:s£ 



"William's Works. Guyot's Works. 

Thompson's Better Land. Kimball'3 Heaven. Valuable Works on Missions. 

Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism. 

Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance. 

The Psalmist : a Collection of Hymns. 

Valuable School Books. Works for Sabbath Schools. 

Memoir of Amos Lawrence. 

Poetical Works of Milton, Cowper, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes. 

Arvine's Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes. 

E,ipley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Etonians. 

Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig. 

Eoget's Thesaurus of English Words. 

Haekett's Notes on Acts. M'Whorter's Yahveh Christ. 

ftrxwcold and Stannius's Comparative Anatomy. Marco's Geological Map, IT. S. 

Beligious and Miscellaneous Works. 

Works in the various Departments of Literature, Science and Art. 



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